In May 2019, Service Mesh Interface (SMI) debuted on the KubeCon EU stage in Barcelona, springing from a cross-ecosystem collaboration between Microsoft, Buoyant, HashiCorp, Solo.io, Kinvolk, and Weaveworks. We saw a need for a common set of consistent, flexible APIs, enabling the creation of tools that can work with service meshes while not being tightly coupled to any specific mesh implementation. The SMI community began as a trailblazing effort to work across the industry outside of the core Kubernetes project, with multiple vendors coordinating efforts on a specification outside of any singular implementation. Read More…

With growing adoption of service meshes in cloud native environments, service mesh abstractions and service mesh-neutral specifications have emerged. Service Mesh Performance and Service Mesh Interface are two open specifications that address the need for universal interfaces for interacting with and managing any type of service mesh. What do each of these specification provide? Service Mesh Performance standardizes service mesh value measurement, characterizing any deployment’s performance by capturing the details of infrastructure capacity, service mesh configuration and workload metadata. Read More…

With the increasing adoption of Service Mesh Interface by what is a vibrant and diverse community of both service mesh providers and ecosystem integrators, the need for verification and validation of SMI implementations is clear. We’re still counting, however, as of this writing SMI has been adopted by more than 10 of the available service meshes and ecosystem tools. As you can see on the service mesh landscape, the last few significant, new service mesh project / product announcements have proclaimed SMI compatibility from the start. Read More…

In this post, I’ll explore the high-level concepts that inform the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification by diving into the technical details behind the Maesh project, what makes the project unique among its peers, and their contributions to the SMI specification. In addition, I’ll be covering the other partners in the ecosystem. For readers unfamiliar with the SMI, I’ll briefly cover the history of the project and goals before diving into the technical bits. Read More…

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication in a microservices environment. Service Mesh Interface (SMI) is a widely-adopted open specification that defines a set of APIs for the most common service mesh use cases (traffic policy, telemetry, and shifting) and enables interoperability of service meshes. The community has been growing rapidly since the SMI announcement at KubeCon EU in May 2019. We are pleased to announce that SMI is now a CNCF Sandbox project; we’re excited to have a neutral home for our community collaboration.