Blog

Meshery offers Providers as a point of extensibility. With a built-in Local Provider (named “None”), Meshery Remote Providers are designed to be pluggable. Remote Providers offer points of extension to users / integrators to deliver enhanced functionality, using Meshery as a platform.

Announced at KubeCon NA 2022 is the v0.6.0 release of Meshery, the CNCF’s cloud native manager. In this latest release, three new feature areas entered beta, and GitOps enablement, with new CLI commands and more are now available to users as previewed at KubeCon NA 2022 this week.

With growing adoption of service meshes in cloud native environments, service mesh abstractions - service mesh-neutral specifications - have emerged. Service Mesh Performance and Service Mesh Interface are two open specifications that address the need for universal interfaces for interacting with and managing any type of service mesh. Let’s examine what each specification provides.

With the increasing adoption of Service Mesh Interface by what is a vibrant and diverse community of both service mesh providers and ecosystem integrators, the need for verification and validation of SMI implementations is clear. We’re still counting, however, as of this writing SMI has been adopted by more than 10 of the available service meshes and ecosystem tools. As you can see on the service mesh landscape, the last few significant, new service mesh project / product announcements have proclaimed SMI compatibility from the start. Validating consistency of these implementations is key to upholding the value of SMI itself.

“Cloud native” doesn’t just mean “running in the cloud.” It’s a specific deployment paradigm and uses containers and an orchestration system (usually Kubernetes) to help provision, schedule, run and control a production workload in the cloud, or even across multiple clouds. Within cloud native deployments, an increasingly common approach to networking is the service mesh concept. With a service mesh, instead of each individual container requiring a full networking stack, a grouping of containers all benefit from a mesh that provides connectivity and networking with other containers as well as the outside world.

As more organizations implement service meshes, they are finding what works and what needs more work, and they are creating new management practices around this knowledge. A few tried-and-tested best practices were detailed last month during KubeCon+CloudNativeCon.