From the EnterprisersProject: How to Explain Service Mesh in Plain English

You can always find great content for your bosses and C-Level's at the Enterprisers Project. They do a great job of explaining the high level concepts of digital transformation and how it relates to containers and Kubernetes. If you've ever tried to explain containers to your manager's manager, you may have had trouble parsing out the details at the individual layer level. To help you explain the finer benefits and points of Istio, the Enterprisers Project interviewed a number of interesting technology minds, none the least of which was our very own Principal Product Manager for Service Mesh, Brian "Redbeard" Harrington. Here's what he had to say:

“A service mesh is a set of software components which act as the “glue” for a set of independent applications. The goal of the mesh is to guarantee secure communications between each application and be able to redirect traffic in the event of failures. Often the features of a service mesh look like a mash-up between a load balancer, a web application firewall, and an API gateway.”

Elsewhere in the piece, Mark Runyon, principal consultant at Improving, has a metaphor using a popular driving app:

“I like to think of a service mesh similar to Waze. You know where you are starting and where you are going, but not necessarily the most effective way to get there. There are lots of events – wrecks, road work, traffic-light outages – which can render your preferred route undesirable. Waze tracks hundreds of thousands of data points to chart out a custom route for each driver on the road. At a very high level, service mesh works in a similar fashion.”

The rest of the article is available here.