By Godson Umejiego, Correspondent USA
International Data Corporation (IDC) has published an IDC Innovators report profiling five start-up vendors that are offering service mesh solutions for microservices networking. The five companies are: Buoyant, Kong Inc., Solo.io, Tetrate, and Traefik Labs.
While container orchestration enables microservices deployments to achieve resilience, cloud-native production environments are subject to networking challenges, especially as microservices-based applications scale and service-to-service interactions become more complex. This is where service mesh comes into play, offering a language-agnostic approach that simplifies microservices networking while abstracting developers from the intricacies of the underlying infrastructure.
“While it’s true that, until now, service meshes have been discussed more than they’ve been deployed by enterprises, we have reached a point where vendors, including several start-ups with open-source software and robust community support, are focusing on simplifying service-mesh deployment and management so that broader adoption can occur,” said research vice president, Datacenter and Multicloud Networks, Brad Casemore. “There’s intense competition and innovation in service mesh, and IDC is confident that the emphasis on simplicity will result in increased enterprise embrace of service meshes in 2021 and beyond.”
The report, IDC Innovators: Service Mesh, 2020 (IDC #US47093420), features five start-up vendors that are addressing the need for secure service-to-service discovery, authentication, connectivity, load balancing, traffic management, and observability with service mesh solutions. The five emerging service mesh vendors are:
Buoyant offers a service mesh that works by inserting lightweight micro-proxies alongside each application instance and then providing a uniform means of controlling and monitoring proxy behavior through the control plane.
Kong Inc. enables a unified control plane to connect, discover, and observe services with a service mesh that can run across multiple zones and clouds, with support for multiple virtual meshes on the same cluster.
Solo.io offers an application workload agnostic service mesh that provides a multi-cluster and multi-platform mesh management plane enabling both developers and IT operations to manage and secure heterogenous meshes.
Tetrate provides an extensible service mesh fabric for heterogenous workloads across heterogenous environments and enables use cases of security, observability, and reliability as well as a safe path to application modernization and zero downtime migration.
Traefik Labs’ products feature traffic management capabilities such as load balancing, retries and failovers, circuit breakers, and rate limiting, access controls and SMI compliance for security, and observability through OpenTracing and out-of-the-box metrics.
