What is a Service Mesh, and Do I Need One When Developing Cloud Native Systems?

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While service meshes may be the next "big thing" in microservices, the concept isn't new. Classical SOA attempted to implement similar technology for abstracting and managing all aspects of service-to-service communication, and this was often realized as the much-maligned Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Several years ago similar technology emerged from the microservice innovators, including Airbnb (SmartStack for service discovery), Netflix (Prana integration sidecars), and Twitter (Finagle for extensible RPC), and these technologies have now converged into the service meshes we are currently seeing being deployed.

In this talk, Daniel Bryant will share with you what service meshes are, why they're well-suited for microservice deployments, and how best to use a service mesh when you're deploying microservices. This presentation begins with a brief history of the development of service meshes, and the motivations of the unicorn organisations that developed them. From there, you'll learn about some of the currently available implementations that are targeting microservice deployments, such as Istio/Envoy, Linkerd, and NGINX Plus.

Attendees will walk away from the talk with a high-level overview of the concept, tools for deciding when best to use a service mesh, and a getting started guide if they decide this technology is the right fit for their organisation.

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