A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages traffic, also known as communication, between services in applications composed of containerized microservices. It is a critical component in a microservices architecture, responsible for the secure, fast, and reliable communication between services. This article answers a lot of the questions you may have about service meshes: What are they and how do they work? Who is using them and why?

As a cloud service provider, observability is a critical subject as it's strongly related to the availability of the services running on the platform. We need to understand everything that is happening on our platform to troubleshoot errors as fast as possible and improve performance issues. A year ago, while the platform was still in private beta, we faced a tough reliability issue: users were facing random 500 errors when accessing their applications.

We are happy to announce the release of Kong Mesh 1.9 and Kuma 1.8! This release is packed with features and improvements such as observability for builtin Gateway, a complete rewrite of the CNI and projected service account tokens support. In order to take advantage of the latest and greatest in service mesh, we strongly suggest upgrading to Kong Mesh 1.9.

Today, the Envoy community has introduced Envoy Gateway, a new project to better support Kubernetes deployments via the new Kubernetes Gateway API, which is the next generation Ingress specification in Kubernetes world. Kong has been deeply invested in the success of Envoy since we started developing Kuma in 2019 – now used in Kong Mesh (built on top of Kuma).