The New Stack: What the Numbers Say about How Service Meshes Are Used Today

Service mesh technologies have emerged as a reliable way to manage observability, security and traffic management in microservices environments, typically with the use of Kubernetes for container orchestration. Specific use cases and needs for service meshes also vary.

The New Stack recently completed a survey about service mesh use cases. While one third of those surveyed said their organizations already use service meshes to control traffic between microservices and Kubernetes environments, adoption rates and use varied significantly among the respondents. Sixteen percent of respondents said that their organization broadly uses service mesh in production environments and 17% said service meshes have limited use in production environments, for example.

In this latest episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Lee Calcote, an analyst and founder of service mesh provider Layer5, and Brian “Redbeard” Harrington, a principal product manager for OpenShift service mesh at Red Hat, discussed the many nuances of what the survey numbers really mean.

Calcote notes how traffic management is seen as a key feature among the many different service mesh capabilities, but it’s most useful to advanced users. Speaking about the use of traffic management functionalities, Calcote said: “Folks tend to be a little more advanced as they get into that because they’re at that point they’re actually affecting traffic and then routing requests differently, as opposed to something like just purely observing or getting a ‘read-only’ view in their environment.”

- - - See the full, original article published on The New Stack. - - -