Features

Service Mesh Manager addresses the whole cloud-native lifecycle of a service mesh-based solution by providing various tools starting from day 0 to day 2 operations. As such a solution requires quite many components to provide the core service mesh functionality, tracing, metrics or safe canary-based deployments (just to name a few) we are dividing Service Mesh Manager into the following layers:

Now let’s see how these layers add up to a complete solution over the whole lifecycle of the product:

Day 0

Day 0, in software development, represents the design phase, during which project requirements are specified and the architecture of the solution is decided. Service Meshes, even if they are offloading the burden of security and traffic routing from the microservices' native side, are complex in nature.

Service Mesh Manager is designed with Day 0 experimentation in mind: we are providing a CLI tool that allows to install Service Mesh Manager without prior experience: you can have an Istio-based service mesh up and running in 15 minutes - with monitoring and tracing included. The user interface allows for rapid experimentation with Istio features via an intuitive dashboard, so during the design phase Engineers can focus on what matters the most: finding the right architecture.

Day 1

Day 1 involves developing and deploying software that was designed in the Day 0 phase. In this phase you create not only the application itself, but also its infrastructure, network, and external services, then implement the initial configuration of it all.

After the initial experimentation, Service Mesh Manager aids this process by not just providing facilities for configuring the service mesh, but also by providing [validations]/docs/mesh-management/validation/ to check for any issues in the deployed settings, and integrated metrics and outlier-detection information to pinpoint any issues with the freshly changed services.

In case of interoperability issues, the traffic tap and automated tracing feature provides more detailed insight into the real-time traffic.

Day 2

Day 2 is the time when the product is shipped or made available to the customer. Here, most of the effort is focused on maintaining, monitoring, and optimizing the system. Analyzing the behavior of the system and reacting correctly are of crucial importance, as the resulting feedback loop is applied until the end of the application’s life.

Service meshes and Istio in particular are developing fast. This is reflected in the N-1 support model it uses: a new Istio version is released every 3 months, and only the last two are supported. Service Mesh Manager helps decrease the risk of these upgrades by providing canary-like control plane upgrades: SREs can gradually upgrade their services to the new version even on a Workload level, and in case an issue happens, the old version of Istio is always available in the cluster to fall back to.

Service Mesh Manager provides a Service Level Objective feature that allows to ensure the solution works within its expected operational parameters. In case of an issue, the automated outlier detection system detects failures and shows them on the topology view. We are aiding postmortems using our timeline feature, that allows for checking out the past state of the deployment, including health data.