Microsoft is the latest company to release its own service mesh solution. The company announced the open-source project: Open Service Mesh (OSM), a lightweight service mesh that runs on Kubernetes.
“It is no secret that although microservice environments enable portability, allow faster and more frequent deployment cycles, and can even enable organizations to create teams with more specialized areas of concern, they also come with increased needs around solutions for traffic management, security, and observability,” Michelle Noorali, software engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a post.
Noorali explained the goal of the project is to have it be a community-lead project. The company plans to implement an open governance model, and has submitted a proposal to donate the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
The project features a control plane that is compatible with the Service Mesh Interface specification, Envoy for the data plane, and a flexible design so it can be used in simple or complex scenarios.
Additionally, OSM aims to simplify tasks such as configuring traffic shifting, securing service-to-service communication, fine-grained access control policies, metrics for debugging and monitoring, integrating with certificate management solutions, and onboarding applications.
“We intend for OSM to be effortless for Kubernetes operators to install, maintain, and run; at the same time, we are resolved that OSM be simple for the entire community to understand and contribute to,” Noorali wrote.
