Engine X to introduce service mesh for Kubernetes

F5 Networks announced the NGINX Service Mesh, a service mesh for Kubernetes, on October 12 (local time). This is the appearance of the counterhorse of Istio, known as the Kubernetes service mesh.

The microservice that builds an application program through several small service associations shortens the development schedule and provides flexible scalability, but also has the disadvantage of complicated communication and debugging between services. Solving this problem is to solve the problem of microservices in the service network level.

In the case of security, communication between services can be encrypted by mTLS (Mutual TLS authentication) to prevent information leakage due to hacker attacks. It is also possible to set up access control to control the services that allow communication. Traffic management provides functions such as rate limiting and circuit blocking in addition to control, such as gradually increasing traffic for new version applications.

In the case of visualization, it can be recognized in Engine X Plus and dashboard monitoring in Grafana. In addition, you can trace the OpenTracing transaction. In addition, legacy services that are not in Kubernetes also support hybrid deployments linked to mesh services.

EngineX service mesh architecture is similar to Istao in building a data plane that abstracts communication between microservices and a control plane in charge of communication routing, but instead of a sidecar proxy (Envoy) that connects to services I use Engine X Plus, the version Engine X. The control plane is optimized for Engine X Plus, and one of the features is that it integrates open source software such as the monitoring platform’s Graphana and Prometheus service mesh authentication, and the SPIRE messaging system’s NATS.

EngineX service mesh is available in bare metal clusters as well as managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Servic (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and is available for free on the F Networks portal site. You can download it. Related information can be found here .