OpenInfra Days North America 2024 at Indiana University

Orchestration engines, like Kubernetes, route network traffic between individual nodes over a virtual overlay network. The overlay network is opaque to existing network security and management tools. The ingress methodology is implemented strictly using the kubernetes API framework. It can’t be applied to all cases needed to integrate with external access points. Service Meshes standardize these needs within a central flexible methodology that relies more on “declarative" than on “imperative” application programming. Service Meshes also provide entry points for outside probes to be used for network management and telemetry gathering purposes under strict security control. Service Meshes can incorporate node labels within policies that can pin workloads to specific nodes, allowing for isolated deployments. There are currently many proxied Service Mesh options to choose from. The presentation will go through the various options and provide the pros and cons of each,