The Service Mesh: Past, Present, and Future

In this talk, William Morgan describes the service mesh, a runtime infrastructure layer that’s rapidly rising to prominence with the advent of open source projects like Istio, Envoy, and Linkerd. We trace the evolution of the service mesh model through three-tiered apps and “fat clients” to the modern, sidecar-based implementations, compare and contrast with ESBs and API gateways, and show that, as with most “new” technology, the ideas and principles behind the service mesh have been around for a long time.