Smart networking with service meshes

Over the past year, service meshes have gained significant interest. Most service meshes have two components: a control plane and a data plane. Anubhav Mishra explains what it takes to build a scalable control and data plane. Anubhav also discusses how HashiCorp Consul provides many features like a distributed key-value store and service discovery that make it ideal for a control plane.

Over the past year, service mesh technologies have gained significant interest. The goal of a service mesh is to provide service-to-service communication along with some higher-level features like observability, policy enforcement, retries, backoff, and security. Most service meshes have two components: a control plane and a data plane. The control plane is responsible for making decisions about where to send the traffic and to configure the data plane. The data plane provides the ability to forward requests from the applications. Consul provides service discovery, health checking, load balancing, and a globally distributed key-value store. These features make Consul ideal as a control plane for a service mesh. The architecture of Consul ensures it is highly available and supports multi-data center topologies. One of the primary goals of Consul is providing service discovery, which is a critical data source for a control plane in a service mesh. Additionally, applications can use Consul’s key-value store to store retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking settings and request them when needed. Consul can provide service discovery and health checking information via an API that configures the data plane. Anubhav Mishra explains what it takes to create a service mesh control plane and discusses options for a data mesh, such as Envoy, Linkerd, NGINX, HAProxy, Traefik, and Fabio. Anubhav also leads a live demo showing how Consul can be used as a control plane to connect applications across a data center.