Turning Your Cloud Native Apps Inside Out With a Service Mesh

The presentation discusses the benefits of using a service mesh to manage cloud native applications and how it can enhance development practices.

• Cloud native best practices have evolved from using in-app libraries to manage concerns around load balancing, circuit breaking, and service discovery to managing those primitives independently in a cloud platform.
• Using a service mesh can greatly simplify managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, cloud environments, or cloud providers.
• Introducing non-cloud-native applications into a cloud-native architecture is possible with a service mesh.
• Service mesh enables the consistent and transparent enablement of advanced security primitives to move towards zero-trust architecture.
• The presentation provides a migration example of how to introduce service mesh into an application architecture.
• The use of service mesh can augment and support Spring and Spring Boot applications, potentially unlocking new capabilities and making things easier for developers and operators.

The speaker emphasizes that the point of the presentation is not to abandon Spring or Spring Cloud, but to show how service mesh can enhance their capabilities. He compares it to peanut butter and chocolate, where putting them together creates a great recipe. The speaker also mentions that their organization, Touchrate, is a big fan of Spring and Spring Cloud.

Cloud native best practices have come a long way from the mid-2010’s when adopters of cloud native patterns were utilizing in-app libraries to manage concerns around load balancing, circuit breaking, service discovery, etc. Many adopters of modern cloud platforms have now realized greater agility and ease of use when those primitives are separated away from the application and managed independently in a cloud platform. This talk will review the pitfalls of those earlier application patterns with an assessment of why we've moved on and, most importantly, the benefits of now operating with an Envoy-based Service Mesh to help you manage your environment and enhance your development practices. It will also address how using a service mesh will help you migrate to this newer development style faster and safer to better enhance your organization's delivery times for updates to products and services.