Five years ago, Kubernetes was simply a container option, but today it's considered an essential component of a container strategy. Many experts and users believe that service mesh technology will follow the same path, but there's still debate on what product, or even class of product, will win out.
Most service mesh discussions center on open source tools like Istio or Linkerd. But because service mesh and its relationship to cloud applications are complex, many users fear open source technology.
Service mesh technology provides message and event flow management, load balancing and component discovery in microservice-based, cloud-native applications. While simpler API brokers work for simple cloud applications, service mesh has become the go-to model for the complex applications enterprises are building. Whether open source is the right approach to service mesh is an important question cloud planners and development teams must address. Let's start with an important point, which is that open source and proprietary aren't the only options. In fact, the definitions of these terms can create a huge hole in offerings that most real-world deployments fall through. The most popular service mesh tools are based on open source technology, but are offered in bundles that provide support and ancillary tools. Because this model dominates, one could argue that open source service mesh isn't viable and proves that a paid strategy is the way to go. This tension, if open source service mesh is viable or not, helps answer the broad question this tip raises.
Users can adopt open source products two ways -- as software that users must support and compile from source code, or as a tool that includes packaging and support. But perhaps one in 10 prospective service mesh users would consider the first of these strategies. Support-bundled open source service mesh software is no longer strictly free. If a company has a strong development team, particularly one familiar with open source software development and use, it could be possible to package and support an open source service mesh at a lower cost than acquiring the support-bundled version. For companies with extensive open source development experience, this is often the driver for going strictly open source. Support-bundled open source service mesh offerings often lag behind the current state of the software.
