Lin Sun and Neeraj Poddar on Istio, Wasm, and the Future of Service Mesh

In this podcast, Lin Sun, senior technical staff member and master inventor at IBM, and Neeraj Poddar, engineering lead and architect at Aspen Mesh, sat down with InfoQ co-host Daniel Bryant. Topics discussed included: the evolution of service mesh data planes and control planes, the new Istio 1.5 architectures, Istio WebAssembly extension support, and the future of service mesh technology.

Why listen to this podcast:

- A service mesh in one implementation approach to provide service discovery, traffic management, and cross-cutting communication concerns that engineers see when they adopt (micro)service-based.

- The data plane of most modern service mesh implementations run out-of-process as a proxy sidecar. This has evolved from library based implementations, such as Airbnb’s SmartStack or Netflix’s OSS libraries.

- The recent release of Istio 1.5 saw the deployment packaging of the control plane move from a microservice-based approach to that of a monolithic implementation, named “istiod”.

- Istio now also supports data plane extensions written in WebAssembly (Wasm). These extensions can modify requests and responses and perform out-of-band actions, such as authentication and authorization.

- Standardisations like the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) can add a lot of value, but the user requirements, common use cases, and the core abstractions of the underlying technology must be well understood.

- Multi-cluster and mesh expansion (out-of-cluster) support is continually improving in Istio and many other service mesh implementations.