How the Service Mesh became a Service Mess by The Art of Modern Ops

The nature of technology is to continuously evolve. Each iteration draws on learnings and mistakes of the past. As we move past the cusp of change from monolithic infrastructures to cloud based microservices we are experiencing an evolution of the tooling and monitoring of our applications. We knew how to monitor our servers, network devices and our applications running on our systems, however the shift to microservices required a new infrastructure and with that new ways to automate and monitor it.

In the early days at Twitter, William Morgan, worked heavily on their in house tools to monitor their transformation to a microservices infrastructure. One critical tool, called Finagle, was eventually open sourced and became the basis for Linkerd which William and co-founder Oliver Gould eventually dubbed a “Service Mesh”.

Linkerd is reminiscent of a monitoring system developed at CloudFoundry leveraging some of Netflix OSS releases as well as the Spring Framework. Without out of the box tools, innovators built what they needed without knowing it was a service mesh.

Now with the widespread adoption of service meshes to manage microservices infrastructures, Buoyant has watched Linkerd adoption skyrocket among organizations adopting cloud native technology such as Kubernetes. (Here is an excellent article by William explaining what every Software Engineer needs to know about service meshes.)

Tune in for a brilliant discussion on the origins of service mesh, its ecosystem and why it’s important for Kubernetes centric infrastructures today.