As service meshes become a critical part of Kubernetes deployments, their costs and complexity are rising. This article reviews the latest updates on service meshes like Linkerd, Istio, Cilium, and others, highlighting the operational and financial implications for infrastructure teams.

What Is a Service Mesh?

A service mesh facilitates secure, reliable, and observable service-to-service communication in a Kubernetes cluster. Key benefits include:

  • Traffic encryption: Ensures secure communication between services.
  • Granular access control: Simplifies restricting traffic between services.
  • Enhanced monitoring: Offers detailed insights into request success, failure, and latency.
  • Reliability features: Adds retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers without changes to application code.

These features, once considered optional, are now essential for production-grade Kubernetes deployments. However, the operational costs of service meshes have shifted dramatically, requiring careful consideration.

Linkerd: A Simpler Mesh, With Costs

Linkerd is known for its simplicity and operational reliability. Recent changes include:

  • No more stable releases: Stable versions are now part of their enterprise offering, Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd.
  • Pricing updates: Initially $2000 per cluster per month, pricing has shifted to a more accessible per-pod model.

Pros:

  • Easy setup and maintenance.
  • Reliable encryption and traffic management.
  • Transparent pricing updates.

Cons:

  • Edge releases might require additional testing.
  • Per-cluster pricing could deter smaller deployments.

Cilium: Performance and Observability, At a Cost

Cilium, powered by eBPF, eliminates sidecar proxies for better performance and scalability. It also serves as a network plugin (CNI) and kube-proxy replacement.

Pros:

  • Superior performance and reduced overhead.
  • Rich observability and network isolation features.

Cons:

  • Cisco acquisition: Following Cisco’s purchase of Isovalent, Cilium users should prepare for enterprise pricing.

Istio: Powerful but Complex

Istio offers comprehensive features but is infamous for its complexity and operational overhead.

Pros:

  • Extensive feature set, including VM support and Ingress Controller capabilities.
  • Backing from major cloud providers like GCP (Anthos).

Cons:

  • High learning curve and troubleshooting effort.
  • Performance concerns at scale.

Cloud Provider Service Meshes

Cloud providers offer managed service mesh solutions to simplify deployment:

  • AWS App Mesh: Free, integrates well with ECS and EC2.
  • GKE Anthos: Managed Istio with reduced complexity.
  • Azure Istio Add-on: Currently in preview, based on Istio.

What Should Teams Do?

As free service meshes become a thing of the past, teams need to make strategic decisions:

  1. Evaluate costs: Determine whether to pay for managed solutions or invest in internal expertise.
  2. Choose wisely: Balance cloud provider lock-in against the flexibility of open-source solutions.
  3. Plan for the future: Consider operational needs and long-term budget implications.

Service meshes remain a cornerstone of modern Kubernetes deployments. Understanding the evolving landscape ensures your team stays ahead of the curve.