Cloud Native Computing Foundation Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Africa 2022, 24 Jul 2022

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From YouTube: What the heck is a Service Mesh ? by Jubril Oyetunji

Description

In the modern era of cloud-native development and Kubernetes, a variety have tools have sprung up to help solve some of the challenges of Observability and microservice communication. In this talk, we would explore the obscure world of the Service Mesh, what they are, how they work, and If it’s right for you.

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KCD Africa 2022 is the 2nd iteration of the Kubernetes Community Days Africa, a CNCF-powered free community event. Visit https://kcdafrica.com for more information.

A

So our next topic is going to be on what the heck is. Savage mesh I always ask this question. As a last year, I always ask this question. In the same phrase, what the hell is Savage match because, like there's so much Mission going around and I, don't know what it's all about. This session is going to be taken by jibril, oyetoonji and Jupiter is a self-taught developer and devops engineer interested in all things, Cloud containers and the go programming language.

A

It's good to have you here. At your view,.

B

Oh hi uh am I Audible.

A

B

uh Hello, everyone, my name, is jabriel and I'm really excited to be presenting this uh session called what the heck is a service mesh. So hopefully we can explore this together and get some inserts, but then this talk so yeah uh a little about me. uh I'm. Currently, a software engineer working at accunox uh really love to go from the programming language and I, sometimes call myself in my second year of University pursuing a degree in cyber security, and you can also find me on Twitter at syntaxena, so yeah service mesh.

A

B

ah So when you Google this, you probably land on Wikipedia and Wikipedia, will tell you a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service to service Communications between microservice microservices using epoxy. But what does that really mean uh when I first started out that didn't really tell me much and I was still as confused.

B

So a simple definition would be a service mesh is a tool for adding a layer of Observer, observability and security between your applications without the need to modify your existing services and I would explain a bit more about this later on the slides.

B

uh So some popular service measures you might have heard of are still link, ID and console so yeah. Now that we have a good idea of what a service mesh is, how does this work and it turns out that the answer is pretty simple.

B

The answer is the sidecar. Well, not this kind of cycle, but service measures use something called the sidecar button. So the cycle essentially sits alongside your application and intercepts requests to and from your application, and this allows the service mesh to provide the extra features of security, observability and whatever other features the service mesh you might choose to provide- and this is also how you are able to modify your service mesh without actually having to modify any application code.

B

So this is a typical example of how it would look in a kubernetes cluster, where there is a Cycle System alongside Service, A, B and C, so any rules or updates I make today service mesh would be made to the site called proxy running alongside your service and not the application itself.

B

Okay, yeah, that's pretty cool, but why.

B

uh The the first one is security. uh Most modern service measures would allow you to fine-tune what service what services are allowed to communicate with each other uh off the top of my head. One that I really like is console and console has something called intentions, so intentions will be basically allow you to uh Define what services can communicate with each other.

B

So, going back to the previous slide, where there was service a b and c, let's I could Define a rule that says only service a is allowed to talk to service B and only service C alloy service B is allowed to talk to service C.

B

So you can start to see how you can fine tune, how what services are allowed to talk to each other and thereby giving you an added layer of security and also another big one is uh neutral TLS, which basically encrypts the communication between services and helps you get gain yet another layer of security. On top of your applications and cool dashboards, more service measures will provide this and it's I find it really attractive.

B

Well, not really by dashboards, I mean observability, so most service measures or all service meshes would give you a the give your observability features. This would allow you to drill into each service running in your cluster or, however, you choose to deploy, and then it will allow you to see things like latency uh field requests.

B

The screenshot I have here is from istio, and this is the kiali dashboard whereby they have some services to call it here, and then you can see what services are talking to each other and how they are communicating, and then they also have some stuff about uh requests per second and then some other metrics. You can really drill into uh one of the cooler features aside. The dashboards, of course, is traffic management, and this allows you to do things like a b testing, blue green deployment and canary deployments.

B

Well, I can tell you that we're doing any of these three on their own can be a bit of a pain and then a service mesh can help. You make it just a little bit more easier. So that's another big reason: I see some people using a service mesh.

B

uh So the other question: should you be using a service mesh? Well, yes, but actually no and the answer is: it actually depends uh in a world of microservices and Cloud native buzzwords. It's easy to think that a service mesh might be the next logical step for your applications, whether you're, microservice or not, I'll, be aware, as Uncle Ben said, the great power comes great responsibility and you should really watch out when thinking of using a service mesh responsibility comes in form of operational costs, and this goes back to your team like.

B

Are they actually ready to Bear the burden of running your service? Mesh I mean depending on how experienced they are. This might not be a problem but adding any new technology or Tech, and even if it's not that new, adding a technology in general could comment on foreseen circumstances.

B

So you should really ask yourself, with your current application, benefit from a service mesh. If the answer is no I, don't think you should be trying to use a service mesh and again is your team ready to handle all that comes with a service mesh?

B

Above all, remember a service mesh is not a silver bullet and iPhone. So thank you very much. That's all for my presentation.

A

That was a great section. Thank you, so much Gabriel for that very introductory um topic on um what the heck is Savage mesh. So if you have any questions for our speaker, you can drop that in the chat and would interact with it. While we still have a speaker right here with us.

C

Actually, I think one thing I like about uh jewelry store is the title: I mean like what the heck is. uh Sorry, Smash and I'm talking about like resonates, it's everyone that is curious about like the topic. um It was FIFA super catchy and I think you really did Justice to to introducing what is service mesh.

A

C

I I understand a lot of folks must have some questions um so I'm currently on Twitter to know if there are any questions for to brill.

C

um From what I can see that there is none.

C

Okay, so so yeah um I guess that's it.

C

C

Yeah for this awesome presentation uh um and yeah I I hope you, you join us next year, because definitely this will be happening next year, so and uh yeah I'm, looking forward to having you join as a speaker or as an organizer. You know next year.

B

All right, thank you so much.

C