Sponsored Keynote: A Mesh has Immense Psychological Value

The talk discusses the importance of using meshes in a composable large-scale distributed architecture and explores different types of meshes beyond layer 7 service meshes.

• In a composable large-scale distributed architecture, meshes are critical to help discover, consume, connect, and observe interconnected components.
• Layer 7 service meshes are not the only type of mesh available and other types, such as Network Service Mesh, Media Service Mesh, and Data Mesh, should be explored.
• Meshes provide discoverability, consistency of policy and consumption, secure data flow connectivity, and deep observability of performance.
• A proposed Public Health Data Mesh for the healthcare use case is an example of a mesh that can discover data sources, provide consistent policy of access and consumption, connect and route information flow, and provide observability around access policy compliance.
• May 25th is proposed to be International Mesh Day to expand the conversation beyond layer 7 service meshes.

The talk starts with a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the protagonist, Arthur Dent, learns the importance of carrying a towel in a distributed system. Similarly, in a composable large-scale distributed architecture, meshes are the most useful thing a cloud-native developer can explore to deal with the convoluted logical dependency graph of APIs, services, and RPC calls.

A mesh is about the most massively useful thing a cloud-native developer can have.But as a community, we have been looking quite narrowly, mostly at service meshes that connect together Layer 7 services. We seem to have spent quite a bit of effort on those and now have a number of them from which to choose, such as LinkerD, Istio, Open Service Mesh, Kuma, Gloo Mesh, and Consul Connect, to name a few.But Layer 7 services are not all that are present in the universe and we need to look beyond the silo of L7 service meshes. Exploring the world of Layer 3 services, we introduced the Network Service Mesh (currently a CNCF Sandbox project) about 2 years ago.In this talk, we will introduce the generalized concept of I/O Meshes and define their attributes. As part of that journey, we will look at 3 concrete examples - the need for a Media Service Mesh for UDP-based services, a Data Mesh that connects together data objects and domains, and the concept of a Storage Mesh which connects together storage entities.