In 2019, my team at Kong introduced a new open source project called Kuma. Now a sandbox project of the CNCF, Kuma is a modern, universal control plane for service mesh based on Envoy. As we celebrate Kuma’s achievements, I want to thank the Kuma community for your support and contributions!
In my Service Mesh 101 article, I talked about some of the basics behind a service mesh: what it is, what it does and where Envoy fits into a service mesh. Having now covered those basics, I’d like to dig into some more in-depth content focused on the basics of Envoy configuration in a service mesh. Recall from the previous article that several different service meshes use Envoy. Istio is an example of a service mesh that leverages Envoy for its data planes.
If you’ve done any reading about service meshes, you’ve probably come across mentions of an open source project named Envoy. And if you’ve done any reading about Envoy, you’ve probably seen references to service meshes. How are these two technologies related? How are they different? Do they work together? I’ll attempt to answer all those questions in this blog post’s first and second parts, plus possibly a few more.
We are happy to announce a new major release of Kuma, and a new major release of Kong Mesh built on Kuma! Kuma 1.3 ships with 10+ new features and countless improvements. Kong Mesh ships we enterprise capabilities for large scale service mesh deployments. We strongly suggest to upgrade, in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest when it comes to service mesh.
A true service mesh should focus on how to manage and orchestrate connectivity globally. Connecting a new service mesh for each use case is a much simpler problem to solve, but doing so won’t help you scale. You’ll just be throwing a service mesh in each cluster and calling it a day. The more appealing solution is to stitch together environments.
In the CNCF ecosystem, Envoy, an open source service proxy developed by Lyft, is a very common choice in service mesh networking. In a previous post we discussed that both Consul and Istio leverage Envoy. Were you aware that you can extend Envoy’s capabilities with WebAssembly? What is WebAssembly? WebAssembly, or Wasm as it is often abbreviated, is not so much of a programming language as it is a specification for a binary instruction format that can be run in sandboxed virtual machines.
Over the past ten years, Clubhouse and other innovative startups built software quickly. They started from scratch and blew past their incumbents. But the fact of the matter is that speed is no longer a differentiator. Everyone can move quickly. We’ve seen it as Facebook and Twitter quickly duplicated Clubhouse’s “innovative” functionality. Today, it’s all about agility—taking the momentum that you’ve already built up.
Adoption of service meshes like Istio is increasing. As a result, Speedscale has developed a webassembly plugin. We extended Envoy using Rust, and no changes are required to your Istio configuration. This allows us to leverage the same sidecars that you have deployed throughout your environment to inspect API traffic. Once we are listening through Istio, the typical Speedscale magic can take place. We can use the data to build integration/performance test suites and autogenerate service mocks.
A service mesh is a software infrastructure layer for controlling communication between services and usually tasked with handling all the network logic required to make microservice applications work seamlessly in a cloud-native environment. It’s the perfect solution to your communications problems.
