The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer. While a service mesh is intended to help developers and SREs with a number of use cases related to service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters, a service mesh also adds operational complexity and introduces an additional control plane for security teams to manage.

In the CNCF ecosystem, Envoy, an open source service proxy developed by Lyft, is a very common choice in service mesh networking. In a previous post we discussed that both Consul and Istio leverage Envoy. Were you aware that you can extend Envoy’s capabilities with WebAssembly? What is WebAssembly? WebAssembly, or Wasm as it is often abbreviated, is not so much of a programming language as it is a specification for a binary instruction format that can be run in sandboxed virtual machines.

Adoption of service meshes like Istio is increasing. As a result, Speedscale has developed a webassembly plugin. We extended Envoy using Rust, and no changes are required to your Istio configuration. This allows us to leverage the same sidecars that you have deployed throughout your environment to inspect API traffic. Once we are listening through Istio, the typical Speedscale magic can take place. We can use the data to build integration/performance test suites and autogenerate service mocks.

A service mesh is a software infrastructure layer for controlling communication between services and usually tasked with handling all the network logic required to make microservice applications work seamlessly in a cloud-native environment. It’s the perfect solution to your communications problems.

Previously, I wrote a Beginner’s Guide to Jaeger + OpenTracing Instrumentation for Go providing guidance on manually instrumenting Go services. This is useful for cases where we want fine-grained tracing of specific functions. However, what if all we want is to trace a service’s inbound and outbound calls with little to no additional code?

When did our infrastructure get so complicated? For many of my clients, the number of resources their applications are built on seems to have snowballed overnight. It was, of course, a gradual progression, and usually a conscious one, but complexity can feel like it grows geometrically with each new resource element. And that complexity can create problems.