THREAD
Nginx has a service mesh too. Is it any good?
Let's find out.
1/
Most service meshes use Envoy as a proxy and for good reasons:
1. It's fully open-source
2. It can be customised on-the-fly via an API
3. It can be extended
2/
Is there a service mesh without Envoy? Of course!
The best example is @Linkerd that uses a custom proxy written in Rust.
Linkerd is smaller and more focussed but it is also slower to add features.
And now there's a new entry: @nginx
3/
But isn't Nginx one of those products not fully open-source proxies?
Yes it is, but they made an exception.
When you run the Nginx Service Mesh you can use Nginx Plus (the paid product) as a proxy for free.
Great isn't it?
4/
How does the meshwork?
There are four main components:
- The API
- SPIRE (cert authority)
- NATS (message broker)
- Nginx Plus as a proxy
Grafana, Prometheus and Zipkin are automatically installed too.