The focus of this blog is to provide step-by-step instructions for deploying and configuring Kong Mesh with Kong Konnect on an AWS ECS instance so that anyone will be able to get pre-production installation of Kong Mesh standing up on their own.

Container technologies are always evolving — and we're not talking Tupperware here. Over the past years, service mesh has emerged as a crucial component for managing complex, distributed systems. As organizations increasingly adopt Kubernetes for orchestrating their containerized applications, understanding how to effectively implement and utilize a service mesh within this environment becomes paramount.

A service mesh is a mechanism for managing communications between the various individual services that make up modern applications in a microservice-based system. When a service mesh is applied, all inter-service communication is routed through proxies, which can be used to implement networking features such as encryption and load balancing.

As a developer working with microservices architectures, you may find yourself facing numerous challenges. Managing multiple services, each with its own potential points of failure, can be complex. Issues such as communication difficulties, security concerns, and lack of visibility are common in these environments. These challenges are not unique. As microservices architectures expand, they often introduce complexities that can be demanding for development teams to handle.

Two of the main tenets of Zero Trust are encryption between services and managing the connections each service is allowed to use. Achieving this generally falls to running a service mesh in a Kubernetes cluster. Refactoring applications to run properly in Kubernetes takes time and considerable investment. For many organizations, running their applications on virtual machines will be a necessity for years to come. However, this doesn't mean security should fall behind.

The service mesh architecture pattern has become a de facto standard for microservices-based projects. In fact, from the mesh standpoint, not just microservices but all components of an application should be under its control, including databases, event processing services, etc.