Service Mesh
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Service Mesh is a free, Oracle-managed service that simplifies the development and operation of cloud native applications. It enables security, observability, and network traffic management—without requiring application changes. OCI Service Mesh automatically encrypts all communications between microservices and collects telemetry, metrics, and logs for application performance and health monitoring.
Benefits of Service Mesh
Zero trust security
OCI Service Mesh uses identities and encryption for all communication between mutually authenticated microservices, together with permission checks imposed by policies. It assists in the automated and declarative implementation of a zero trust security architecture.
Microservices access control
OCI Service Mesh decouples network and security configurations from the Kubernetes configuration, application code, and microservices framework or tooling. This enables developers to actively secure and connect microservices and debug them as necessary.
End-to-end visibility
OCI Service Mesh automatically captures a variety of network and microservice metrics and logs. These metrics and logs provide information about failures, latency, and traffic volume, which the application team can use to monitor the application’s overall health.
Dynamic traffic control
OCI Service Mesh captures all traffic between microservices and provides centralized application traffic control. Using mesh virtual resources, developers can abstract communication between microservices to easily support canary deployments and A/B tests.
Service Mesh features
Microservice-to-microservice authentication and encryption
For security, OCI Service Mesh encrypts and mutually authenticates all microservice-to-microservice communication by default. Clients outside the mesh cannot call microservices directly; they must use the ingress gateway.
Access policies for microservice traffic
Access policies define how microservices can communicate with one another declaratively, without affecting the underlying programming logic. By default, all communication is off, and the application team must allow any microservice-to-microservice communication that the application requires to function properly.
Microservice metrics
OCI Service Mesh's default setting is to emit telemetry data, such as latency, HTTP errors, and requests, from all microservices in the mesh. Using Prometheus, the de facto standard tool for cloud native monitoring, the application team may gather metrics that track the health of the microservices in the mesh and use them to improve the performance of those microservices.
Microservice access logging
By default, the proxy writes logs to the standard output of sidecar containers. Through integration with OCI Logging, the OCI Service Mesh automatically collects and centralizes access logs generated by requests across all microservices for further issue analysis.
Microservice traffic management
Traffic routing rules govern all intermicroservice network traffic and calls between microservices within the mesh. Setting rules in the virtual service routing table divides traffic among different microservice versions. This allows for A/B testing, applying a different load balancing policy to traffic for a specific subset of microservice instances, and performing canary deployments to accelerate deployments with minimal microservice interruption.
Ingress traffic management
The ingress gateway routes traffic from external clients to the cluster's microservices using a set of rules. For exposing multiple hostnames, the ingress gateway allows wildcard hostnames in the prefix form, which is useful when exposing several domains. Service Mesh automatically captures insights from metrics and logs for all incoming traffic—as it does for intermicroservice communication.
Service Mesh use cases
Monitoring
Easily secure, monitor, connect, and expose cloud native applications.
Security
Comply with regulatory requirements by encrypting data in transit within a mesh network.
Deployment
Use traffic splitting or A/B testing for faster and more reliable deployment of microservices.
Communication
Control how microservices communicate with each other, and implement a zero trust model.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Mesh pricing
There are no charges for using OCI Service Mesh. Customers only pay for the infrastructure required to run the proxy component that runs alongside the application.
Related products
Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)
Highly available container orchestration
Observability and Management
Visibility and actionable insights to ease management
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