Sensedia Service Mesh - Observability and Security for Microservices

Before addressing the Microservices and Service Mesh topics, one should understand the current context of delivering experiences in digital businesses, and how the adoption of microservices and service mesh based architectures aims to support this scenario.

The delivery of experience to customers has evolved into a multi-experience ecosystem, through a variety of channels (physical and digital) and partners, who need to deliver experiences in an integrated manner, through coordinated real-time actions and exchange of information.

This context places the need for more scalability and agility, and has been driving the adoption of new architectural models based on Microservices and Service Mesh, also capable of providing greater reuse and resilience in IT environments.

Despite the growing adoption of these architectures, IT teams have faced non-trivial challenges related to implementation, traffic controls, operation, observability, standardization, governance, and security.

To overcome these challenges, companies need teams with several highly qualified and experienced professionals in these areas. Moreover, there is a lack of mature and complete tools that automate part of the manual/repetitive tasks involved in the management of Microservices, which makes room for errors, lack of standardization and rework.

What is the Sensedia Service Mesh?

Service Mesh is a configurable, low-latency infrastructure layer designed to handle a high volume of network communication between microservices.‍

Istio provides many facilities to deal with this communication, but requires high knowledge and experience of professionals, in addition to demanding many manual tasks.

The Sensedia Service Mesh is a low-code platform that brings observability, advanced traffic controls, analytics, governance and unified security to microservices and service mesh-based architectures.

The Sensedia Service Mesh provides advanced, low-code tools for managing microservices and service mesh, such as:

• Easy application of security mechanisms to microservices;

• Centralization of the analytics model

• Real-time observability with dashboards and logs

• Graphical display of end-to-end dependencies;

• Traffic controls (shadow traffic, canary release, diversion of routes ...)

• Unified management with Sensedia API Management of north-south and east-west integrations

The use of Sensedia Service Mesh automates fundamental security and control tasks, facilitating the management by teams and freeing professionals to focus on more strategic activities for the business, thus providing greater productivity and reducing risks to your IT architecture.

If I have an API Gateway for my internal APIs, do I need a Service Mesh? (or vice versa)

These platforms have different approaches, and can exist on their own – it is a matter of scenery and focus. In most digital business scenarios, companies would benefit from the capabilities of both. In these cases, the architecture is even more robust, as long as we are able to leverage the strengths of each one. In the diagram below, it becomes clearer:

The API Management is the most recommended platform for handling North-South traffic, that is, it centralizes the external consumption of APIs that direct to internal services, implementing security mechanisms, transformation, traffic control, scalability, collecting metrics and applying monetization models. Furthermore, complete API Management platforms have Dev Portal to engage devs and facilitate the consumption of APIs.

The East-West traffic refers to communications between internal services. Using an API Management platform to mediate this communication, in some cases, can impose an excessive burden on service-to-service interactions and lack important resources. Service Mesh provides better performance in managing this communication, in addition to advanced traffic controls, distributed configurations, authentication and authorization features, among others.

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