Blog

With the increasing adoption of Service Mesh Interface by what is a vibrant and diverse community of both service mesh providers and ecosystem integrators, the need for verification and validation of SMI implementations is clear. We’re still counting, however, as of this writing SMI has been adopted by more than 10 of the available service meshes and ecosystem tools. As you can see on the service mesh landscape, the last few significant, new service mesh project / product announcements have proclaimed SMI compatibility from the start. Validating consistency of these implementations is key to upholding the value of SMI itself.

“Cloud native” doesn’t just mean “running in the cloud.” It’s a specific deployment paradigm and uses containers and an orchestration system (usually Kubernetes) to help provision, schedule, run and control a production workload in the cloud, or even across multiple clouds. Within cloud native deployments, an increasingly common approach to networking is the service mesh concept. With a service mesh, instead of each individual container requiring a full networking stack, a grouping of containers all benefit from a mesh that provides connectivity and networking with other containers as well as the outside world.