"When should I deploy a service mesh?"

the adopter's dilemma

Factors of your service mesh's functionality

it depends...

At this point, you might be thinking, “I have a container orchestrator. Why do I need another infrastructure layer?”

Service-level needs

With microservices and containers mainstreaming, container orchestrators provide much of what the cluster (nodes and containers) need.

How Strongly to Consider a Service Mesh

Lightly

Strongly

Factors of your enviroment and workloads

Service communication

The higher volume of service requests that you have to internal and external services there are, the more insight and control you will need and the higher the return on investment your service mesh will deliver.

Observability

Edge focus—metrics and usage are for response time to clients and request failure rates.

Lightly

Strongly

Interservice Communication

The higher volume of service requests that you have to internal and external services there are, the more insight and control you will need and the higher the return on investment your service mesh will deliver.
50

Observability

Edge focus—metrics and usage are for response time to clients and request failure rates.
50

Perspective from which you think of your APIs

Strong separation of external and internal users. Focused on external API experience. APIs are used primarily for client-facing interaction.APIs are for clients only.
50

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Security Model

The security characteristics are desirable qualities of any deployment. Apply defense-in-depth. Why not pull these into a single layer of control?
50

# of services

Deploy a service mesh early. Doing so lowers risk and affords you time to become confident with the operations of a service mesh.
50

Service reliability

Resilient infrastructure and highly available services are ideal in any environment. Let the service mesh do the heavy lifting for you.
50

Size of your organization

a very small (<5 engineer) team
50

Diversity of application stack

Whether your environment is polyglot or not, service mesh instrumentation delivers uniformity, decouples Dev and Ops, and melts infrastructure concern off of application code.
50

Services-first Network

What is A
Service Mesh?

Service meshes provide intent-based networking for microservices describing desired behavior of the network in the face of constantly changing conditions and network topology.

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Layer5, the cloud native management company

An empowerer of engineers, Layer5 helps you extract more value from your infrastructure. Creator and maintainer of cloud native standards. Maker of Meshery, the cloud native manager.