Gartner Research

Market Guide for Service Mesh

Published: 02 August 2023

Summary

Maintaining visibility and control of service-to-service communications in container management systems and distributed microservices architectures is a challenge for software engineering leaders. Use this research to review service mesh options and determine its suitability to solve this challenge.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • The hype around service mesh software has mostly settled down, and the market has not grown as much as was once anticipated. This raises questions about the usefulness and ROI of service meshes for most organizations.

  • A service mesh can significantly improve observability, security and control in service-to-service communications, but adds complexity and architectural overhead.

  • Some service mesh functionalities come bundled with container management systems and cloud platforms. However, they may prove inferior to the unique advantages that some independent vendors offer for streamlined deployment, operations and multicluster support.

Recommendations

Software engineering leaders responsible for evaluating service meshes should:

  • Decide

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