7 Signs You Need a Service Mesh

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern applications and cloud native architectures, the need for efficient, scalable, and secure communication between services is paramount. Enter the service mesh — a versatile platform designed to address various challenges in securing, connecting, and observing microservices.

In this post, we’ll cover seven signs that indicate it may be time for your organization to adopt a service mesh.

Do I need a service mesh?

From enhancing application modernization to ensuring a smooth transition during cloud migrations, a well-implemented service mesh can be a game-changer for your microservices architecture.

A service mesh is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but if you find any of the following signs resonate with you and your organization, it might be time to explore the benefits and possibilities it offers.

Want to learn more about what to look for in a service mesh and the benefits they offer? Check out the on-demand webinar The State of Service Mesh.

1. Application modernization

One of the primary reasons to adopt a service mesh is to facilitate application modernization.

By having the service mesh treat the networking as a commodity, developers can delegate cross-cutting concerns to the platform. This includes essential aspects like traffic management (like canary rollout), resilience (like retries or circuit-breaker), and east-west (E/W) security (L4 and L7 policies).

The benefits are numerous — from accelerating development cycles to reducing costs and avoiding common implementation mistakes. With normalized logs and metrics, developers gain a unified view, easing the collection process.

2. Mission-critical upgrades

When dealing with mission-critical upgrades, a service mesh becomes indispensable. Dark launch, resilience assessments, and chaos engineering of new versions are made possible through features like traffic mirroring, fault injection, and progressive rollouts (backed by Flagger or Argo Rollout that automate traffic shifting based on metrics).

The business value here is clear: avoiding downtime and honoring service level agreements (SLAs).

3. Platform modernization

As organizations embark on platform modernization journeys, they can leverage established principles like infrastructure-as-code and security-as-code, which can be effectively implemented through GitOps methodologies. By adopting a single-pane-of-glass approach for both internal and external traffic, businesses can streamline their operations, maintain consistent configurations, and enhance visibility into their infrastructure.

Security-as-code, built upon the foundation of infrastructure-as-code, becomes a reality, enabling organizations to enforce security policies consistently across their infrastructure and applications. 

Additionally, organizations can expose their API products on a Developer Portal, making them accessible from anywhere and fostering collaboration and efficiency among developers. API owners can compose API as products from existing or discovered services throughout the mesh (optionally multi-cluster).

4. Cloud migration

Cloud migration efforts can benefit significantly from the deployment of a service mesh.

By implementing traffic control policies, organizations can seamlessly shift traffic between on-premises and cloud provider clusters. This approach facilitates better handling of traffic spikes with cloud elasticity, whether using Kubernetes or Serverless architectures.

Another typical use case is to onboard legacy applications running on VMs onto the mesh. Once configured, it becomes straightforward to progressively shift the traffic to your Kubernetes clusters and benefit from Kubernetes automation capabilities.

Capabilities like Service Federation and Virtual Destinations, exemplified by solutions like Kuma, become crucial for a smooth transition.

5. Multi-cloud

For those operating in multi-cloud environments, a service mesh helps federate platforms and build a global service registry. This enables efficient E/W traffic across cloud providers and regions, providing global and streamlined observability.

The platform enforces global and fine-grained authorization policies, along with locality-aware load-balancing and failover. The result? Bridging gaps between services running in different clouds, achieving global visibility, and applying consistent security policies.

6. Multi-tenancy

Organizations embracing multi-tenancy can leverage a service mesh to segregate tenant workloads into logical boundaries like namespaces or based on resource labels.

SaaS operators can expose shared services effectively whilst applying L7 network policies to facilitate tiering through quotas, offering the first step toward tenant monetization based on metrics and usage. This not only lays a robust foundation for SaaS operators but also introduces a new business model.

7. Zero-trust programs

For organizations with Zero-Trust (ZT) programs, a deployed service mesh becomes a valuable asset. With a policy-driven approach, it becomes easy to enforce both L4 and L7 security rules between workloads that belong to different teams or business units. 

Service-to-service communication is secured through in-depth security mechanisms like unique cryptographic identities assigned to workloads (implementation of the SPIFFE framework). 

Additionally, a global control plane will provide a global view of service-to-service interactions. 

Auditing platform changes, exporting to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and ensuring future-proof, cloud-agnostic solutions contribute to a concrete Zero-Trust implementation with measurable success.

Kong Mesh vs Kuma

Are you ready to elevate your microservices game? Kong Mesh and OSS Kuma are two options that should be on your list. In the latest GigaOm Radar for Service Mesh report, Kong Mesh, the enterprise version of Kuma, was recognized as a leader and outperformer in the service mesh landscape. 

Let's delve into the specifics of each solution to gain a deeper understanding. Kuma, a lightweight and extensible service mesh, is built on industry-standard tools and technologies, including Envoy, eBPF for efficient traffic interception, WebAssembly for extending Envoy's functionality, and the SPIFFE identity model for secure communication between services. 

Kuma: The easy-to-operate open source solution

When considering open source solutions, Kuma — the OSS project developed by Kong and donated to the CNCF — stands out as the easiest-to-operate service mesh.

• Kuma is designed with ease of use in mind. Whether you're new to service meshes or a seasoned pro, Kuma's intuitive interface and CRDs ensure a smooth and painless experience from installation to operation, even on multiple platforms.
• With Kuma, managing microservices becomes a breeze. Benefit from advanced features like traffic management, resilience, telemetry, and security, all while enjoying the simplicity that sets Kuma apart.
• Kuma is a multi-cluster-aware service mesh that can be managed by a global control plane. This global control plane simplifies the management of service connectivity across multiple zones or regions.

Kong Mesh: Seamless enterprise-grade microservices management

Kong’s commercial service mesh offering, Kong Mesh, is built on top of Kuma’s tested open source tech and enhanced with critical features to support enterprise workloads. 

• Kong Mesh delivers a run-anywhere approach — supporting workloads across bare metal, Kubernetes, and VMs without added complexity.
• Kong Mesh’s ease of use and built-in automation capabilities stand in stark contrast to complex open source solutions that are difficult to deploy and manage (e.g., global service discovery or identity federation)
• Kong Mesh comes with additional capabilities like built-in Open Policy Agent to extend your authorization policies and also integration with Secret Management platforms (e.g., Hashicorp Vault, Cert-Manager, AWS Certificate Manager)
• Kong offers FIPS 140-2 compliance and a consistent application of security policies across environments.
• Kong’s Technical Support Engineering team offers 24/7 support.

Kong Mesh is integrated with Kong Konnect, the unified platform for API management, service mesh, and ingress controller.

Get started

Ready to experience the service mesh revolution? Try Kuma today and discover why it's the preferred open source choice for organizations looking to streamline their microservices architecture.

Looking for an enterprise-grade service mesh? Start for free with Kong Konnect and see how you can leverage Kong to connect, manage, and secure digital experiences across any environment or platform.