Service meshes have emerged as essential tools in managing deployments on containers and microservices. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find DevOps teams that have successfully deployed on Kubernetes without the observability and management capabilities they offer give the immense complexity involved in such a project.

The key role service meshes play in the cloud native world also accounts for why they were a major topic discussed during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona and how Envoy, Istio, Linkerd, Aspen Mesh and other projects will continue to serve as open source alternatives.

Indeed, the announcements at KubeCon about Microsoft’s Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification and how Solo.io has created what it calls “the first reference implementations” for SMI were arguably the most important newsworthy developments during the conference.

Solo.io’s founder and CEO Idit Levine was also on hand to put service meshes into perspective as one of the panel guests during The New Stack pancake breakfast in this podcast about services meshes held during the first of the Barcelona conference. Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief, and co-hosted by Libby Clark, editorial director, of The New Stack, the other guests on hand included, in addition to Levine:

Cliff Grossner, executive director research and technology fellow, IHS Markit;

Pere Monclus, vice president and CTO, networking and security, VMware;

Florian Dudouet, product owner and cloud engineer, Swisscom;

Lee Calcote, founder, Layer5, and author of “The Enterprise Path to Service Mesh Architectures.”

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2v9zvBR7Ds