3 years ago

Category: Kubernetes, nginx

Earlier this month, NGINX introduced the NGINX Service Mesh (NSM), a free and open source service mesh that uses NGINX Plus, the company’s commercial version of its open source NGINX proxy, to power its data plane. While many service meshes are built from entirely open source components, NGINX Vice President of Marketing Rob Whiteley said that rather than putting yet another open source solution on the market, they wanted to focus on targeting NSM to the missing piece in the current market, which he sees as customers struggling with the scale and complexity of Istio.

NGINX Service Mesh “is lighter weight, easier to install, and really designed for people that have just begun to outgrow an ingress controller-only traffic pattern.

NGINX is already the default ingress controller in the market, so really the goal of NGINX Service Mesh was to provide a next logical step, where you’re already using NGINX for ingress and egress out of the cluster, now you just need to handle some of the service traffic, east-west instead of north-south,” said Whitely.

In this way, NSM is targeted as a sort of beginner’s service mesh, and Whitely says they have a long term goal to make it a seamless transition to move from NSM to Aspen Mesh, the more advanced, Istio-based service mesh built by its now-parent company F5 Networks.