| I keep a Google sheet updated with feature differences between LinkerD, LinkerD2, Consul Connect and Istio. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OBaKrwR030G39i0n_47i... From my own experience I've had some great success with LinkerD in the past on Mesos DC/OS. Since moving companies, and switching to Kubernetes, we've yet to deploy any service mesh into production. The blog from Jerome highlights many of the benefits already. From my perspective the bigs ones in the past were: - Tracing (with Zipkin)
- Retries which removed or fixed dodgy app reconnect logic
- Time series metrics in LinkerDViz showing realtime rates and latency and errors between services
The reason we haven't used any service mesh at my current company is mostly based on stability concerns.Istio gets all of the cool press attention and blogs written about it. Yet, you also read a lot of warnings about it always being 6 months away from being really robust. Even at version 1 we read some horror stories about obscure bugs showing up in fairly standard use cases. Connectivity between services is too scary to gamble on. It's a similar deal with CNI (we're still on Calico despite arguably cooler stuff being out there) and Ingresses (still on ingress-nginx). AWS have a service mesh that is probably going to be the one we trial next at work. Improved observability and retries would definitely be of benefit on our current platform. Another driving factor is also our security team wanting mutual TLS between services. |