DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DataOps
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • Calendar View
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Calendar View
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Content
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Cloud Native Now
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Techstrong TV
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • Sponsor
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • CI/CD
  • Continuous Testing
  • DataOps
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Platform Engineering
  • Sustainability
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • ROELBOB
Hot Topics
  • How to Build Successful DevOps Teams
  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
  • Serial Entrepreneur
  • Chronosphere Adds Professional Services to Jumpstart Observability
  • Friend or Foe? ChatGPT's Impact on Open Source Software

Home » Microservices Journal » Design and Architecture » How Service Mesh Addresses 3 Key Microservices Challenges

How Service Mesh Addresses 3 Key Microservices Challenges

Avatar photoBy: Zach Jory on July 30, 2018 2 Comments

I was recently reading the “Global Microservices Trends” report by Dimensional Research and found myself thinking, “A service mesh could help with that.” Let’s look at three key challenges listed in the report.

Recent Posts By Zach Jory
  • Enabling the Financial Services Shift to Microservices
  • Knowing What Your Microservices Are Doing
  • The Road Ahead for Service Mesh
Avatar photo More from Zach Jory
Related Posts
  • How Service Mesh Addresses 3 Key Microservices Challenges
  • Hooked on Service Metrics
  • 4 big challenges of microservices
    Related Categories
  • Design and Architecture
  • Microservices Journal
    Related Topics
  • infrastructure
  • microservices
  • research
  • service mesh
Show more
Show less

A couple key points in the report make it clear microservices are seeing widespread adoption. It’s also clear that along with the myriad benefits they bring, there are also tough challenges that come as part of the package. From the report:

Cloud Native NowSponsorships Available
  • 91 percent of enterprises are using microservices or have plans to.
  • 99 percent of users report challenges with using microservices.

Major Microservices Challenges

The report identifies a range of challenges companies are facing.

Companies are seeing a mix of technology and organizational challenges. We’ll focus on the technological challenges a service mesh solves, but it’s worth noting that one thing a service mesh does is bring uniformity so it’s possible to for all teams to have the same view, reducing the need for certain skills.

Each Additional Microservice Increases the Operational Challenges

Not with a service mesh! A service mesh provides monitoring, scalability and high availability through APIs instead of using discrete appliances. This flexible framework removes the operational complexity associated with modern applications. Infrastructure services were traditionally implemented as discrete appliances, which meant going to the actual appliance to get the service. Each appliance is unique, which makes monitoring, scaling and providing high availability difficult. A service mesh delivers these services inside the compute cluster itself through APIs and doesn’t require any additional appliances. Implementing a service mesh means adding new microservices without adding complexity.

It is More Difficult to Identify the Root Cause of Performance Issues

The service mesh toolbox gives you a couple of things that help solve this problem:

Distributed Tracing: Tracing provides service dependency analysis for different microservices and tracking for requests as they are traced through multiple microservices. It’s also a powerful way to identify performance bottlenecks and zoom into a particular request to identify which microservice contributed to the latency of a request or which service created an error.

Metrics Collection: With service mesh you also get the ability to collect consistent metrics across your mesh. Metrics are key to understanding what has happened in your applications, and when they were healthy compared to when they were not. A service mesh can gather telemetry data from across the mesh and produce consistent metrics for every hop. This makes it easier to quickly solve problems and build more resilient applications.

 

Differing Development Languages and Frameworks

Another major challenge that report respondents noted facing was the challenge of maintaining a distributed architecture in a polyglot world. When making the move from monolith to microservices, many companies struggle with the reality that, to make things work, they have to use different languages and tools. Large enterprises can be especially affected by this, as they have many large, distributed teams. Service mesh provides uniformity by providing programming language agnosticism, which addresses inconsistencies in a polyglot world where different teams, each with its own microservice, are likely to be using different programming languages and frameworks. A mesh also provides a uniform, applicationwide point for introducing visibility and control into the application runtime, moving service communication out of the realm of implied infrastructure, to where it can be easily seen, monitored, managed and controlled.

Microservices are cool, but service mesh makes them ice cold. If you’re on the microservices journey and are finding it difficult to manage the infrastructure challenges, a service mesh may be the right answer. Let me know if you have any questions on how to get the most out of service mesh, I’m happy to talk and you can find me @zjory.

— Zach Jory

Filed Under: Design and Architecture, Microservices Journal Tagged With: infrastructure, microservices, research, service mesh

« Why Database Development is in a League of Its Own
DevOps Experience: Learn a Lot without Leaving Your Spot »

Techstrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Securing Your Software Supply Chain with JFrog and AWS
Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT
Maximize IT Operations Observability with IBM i Within Splunk
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT
Secure Your Container Workloads in Build-Time with Snyk and AWS
Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 3:00 pm EDT

GET THE TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK

Sponsored Content

PlatformCon 2023: This Year’s Hottest Platform Engineering Event

May 30, 2023 | Karolina Junčytė

The Google Cloud DevOps Awards: Apply Now!

January 10, 2023 | Brenna Washington

Codenotary Extends Dynamic SBOM Reach to Serverless Computing Platforms

December 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard

Why a Low-Code Platform Should Have Pro-Code Capabilities

March 24, 2021 | Andrew Manby

AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

December 17, 2020 | JT Giri

Latest from DevOps.com

How to Build Successful DevOps Teams
June 5, 2023 | Mariusz Tomczyk
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
June 5, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Chronosphere Adds Professional Services to Jumpstart Observability
June 2, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Friend or Foe? ChatGPT’s Impact on Open Source Software
June 2, 2023 | Javier Perez
VMware Streamlines IT Management via Cloud Foundation Update
June 2, 2023 | Mike Vizard

TSTV Podcast

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays

Most Read on DevOps.com

No, Dev Jobs Aren’t Dead: AI Means ‘Everyone’s a Programmer’? ¦ Interesting Intel VPUs
June 1, 2023 | Richi Jennings
What Is a Cloud Operations Engineer?
May 30, 2023 | Gilad David Maayan
Forget Change, Embrace Stability
May 31, 2023 | Don Macvittie
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
May 30, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Revolutionizing the Nine Pillars of DevOps With AI-Engineered Tools
June 2, 2023 | Marc Hornbeek
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2023 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.