Discussing Service Mesh Architectures

Show: 387

Description: Aaron and Brian talk with Armon Dadgar (@armon, Founder/CTO @HashiCorp) about the problems service mesh can solve, the underlying technologies, control plane vs. data plane considerations, and who is making decisions about service meshes within an IT organization.

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Show Interview Links:

• Hashicorp - http://hashicorp.com
• What is a Service Mesh - https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/what-is-a-service-mesh
• Consul - https://www.consul.io/

Show Notes:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. It’s been a couple years since HashiCorp has been on the show, so give us an update on the company - big round of funding ($100M) in November.

Topic 2 - A couple months ago we saw you in a video called “What is a Service Mesh?”. It was intended to be a “let’s make this simple” and you realize that a Service Mesh could be a lot of things - L4-L7 routing, Proxy, Encryption, Authentication, Application patterns. Is a Service Mesh solving a new problem, or is it pulling together lots of things that have existed at L4-L7 and application stacks in the past? 

Topic 3 - “Service Mesh” has become a pretty crowded and fragmented market over the last couple years. HashiCorp Consul has been around since 2014 (was originally “Service Discovery”) and now there’s Linkerd, Istio, Envoy and a bunch of variations. As you talk to people in the market, how are they evaluating the options out there?  

Topic 4 - Consul has evolved from Service Discovery to Service Mesh, and seems to have come from more of an authentication and security perspective (some others tends to be more routing-centric). Are there use-cases when one Service Mesh is a better fit than others, or should we expect that all/most of them will more or less converged on features over the next 12-24 months? 

Topic 5 - Can you give us some examples of how companies are using Service Meshes today (parts or all of the capabilities) and what teams are usually driving the adoption (infra/ops, security, app-dev, etc.)?

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