Hello Service Mesh Interface (SMI): A Specification for Service Mesh Interoperability

Service Mesh Interface (SMI) defines a set of common, portable APIs that provide developers with interoperability across different service mesh technologies, including Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect. Today we are excited to launch Service Mesh Interface (SMI) which defines a set of common, portable APIs that provide developers with interoperability across different service mesh technologies including Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect. SMI is an open project started in partnership with Microsoft, Linkerd, HashiCorp, Solo, Kinvolk, and Weaveworks; with support from Aspen Mesh, Canonical, Docker, Pivotal, Rancher, Red Hat, and VMware.

For years, the mantra for network architecture was to keep your network pipes as dumb as possible and build smarts into your applications. The network’s job is to forward packets, while any logic for encryption, compression, or identity lives inside the network endpoints. The Internet is premised on that mantra, so you could say it has worked fairly well.

But today with the explosion of micro-services, containers, and orchestration systems like Kubernetes, engineering teams are faced with securing, managing, and monitoring an increasing number of network endpoints. Service mesh technology provides a solution to this problem by making the network smarter, much smarter. Instead of teaching all your services to encrypt sessions, authorize clients, emit reasonable telemetry, and seamlessly shift traffic between application versions, service mesh technology pushes this logic into the network, controlled by a separate set of management APIs.

Source: microsoft.com