Microsoft today announced the launch of a new mesh of open source services based on the Envoy proxy. Open Service Mesh is designed to be a reference implementation of the SMI (Service Mesh Interface) specification, a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes that has the support of most players in this ecosystem.
The company plans to donate Open Service Mesh the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to make sure it is community driven and has open governance.
"SMI is really in resonance with people and therefore we really thought there was room in the ecosystem for a reference implementation of SMI where mesh technology was first and foremost the implementation of those SMI APIs and making it the best experience SMI possible for customers, "Microsoft told me Gabe Monroy, director of partner management for Azure Compute (and a member of the board of CNCF).
He also added that because SMI provides the API design with the lowest common denominator, Open Service Mesh offers users the ability to "save" on raw Envoy if they need some more advanced features. This "cliff-free" design, Monroy noted, is at the heart of the philosophy behind Open Service Mesh.
As for the set of features, SMI manages all the standard service mesh features that you would expect, including the protection of communications between services via mTLS, management of access control policies, monitoring of services and more .
Today there are many other service mesh technologies on the market. So why should Microsoft launch it?
"What our customers have told us is that the solutions available today, which Istio is a good example, are extremely complex," he said. "It's not just me who says it. We see the data in the AKS support queue of customers who are trying to use this stuff - and are struggling right here. This is just a difficult technology to use, a difficult technology to build on a large scale. And so the solutions that were out there had something that wasn't entirely right and we really felt something lighter and something with more attention to SMI was what would hit the weak point for customers who delighted in this technology today. "
Monroy also noted that Open Service Mesh can be used alongside other solutions such as Linkerd, for example.
Many experts expected Google to also donate its Istio service mesh to CNCF. That move didn't materialize. "It's fun. Many people are very focused on the governance aspect of this," he said. "I think that when people focus too much on this, you lose track of customer behavior with this technology. And the truth is that customers today are not enjoying themselves with Istio in the wild. I think even people who are deep in that community will recognize it and this is really the reason why we are not currently interested in contributing to that ecosystem ".