Listen to all of our podcasts here: https://thenewstack.io/podcasts/

In this, The New Stack Analysts podcast, Lee Calcote, an analyst and founder of Layer5, and Brian “Redbeard” Harrington, a principal product manager for OpenShift service mesh at Red Hat, discussed the many nuances of what the survey numbers really mean.

Calcote, for example, notes how traffic management is seen as a key feature among the many different service mesh capabilities, but it’s most useful to advanced users. Speaking about the use of traffic management functionalities, Calcote said: “Folks tend to be a little more advanced as they get into that because they’re at that point they’re actually affecting traffic and then routing requests differently, as opposed to something like just purely observing or getting a ‘read-only’ view in their environment.”

Harrington agreed. “I’m happy that Lee kind of pointed out the specific distinction around traffic control, because among the users who I’m talking to that’s the — pun intended — ‘gateway drug,'” Harrington said. Organizations with legacy bare metal environments and “pretty expensive hardware incumbencies” face challenges as they move “move to dynamic environments” and as they “de-prioritize” some legacy hardware, traffic management capabilities service meshes can provide help when making the shift, Harrington said.

The survey results and experience in the field also indicate organizations are still mulling the best use cases for service meshes. When asked whether an organization should adopt or how they should begin to rely on service meshes, it is often “irrespective of whether they’re starting on the simpler…or more sophisticated [possibilities] in that spectrum,” Calcote said.”The advice is generally the same which is you should start and adopt a bit at a time a bit of value at a time and what that value is sort of dependent upon what you’re looking for out of mesh,” Calcote said. “But between you getting comfortable with what you’ve deployed and getting the value out of what you’ve deployed, [organizations should] take the next step from there to hopefully at some point leverage all of the functionality of the mesh.”