When to use Open Service Mesh?

Open Service Mesh (OSM) is a solution that adheres to the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes. Service meshes come with the following benefits

• Increased resilience with built-in retries and circuit-breakers
• Enhanced load balancing by understanding layer-7 protocols
• Increased security by ensuring mTLS and fine-grained authorizations within the mesh
• Greater observability
• Greater deployment and testing capabilities

One of the key benefits of using a service mesh is the ability to enable mTLS (Mutual TLS) authentication across services belonging to the mesh. This extra security is typically the first incentive pushing organizations to adopt a service mesh.

Unlike firewalls, service meshes work on layer-7 (application layer) and “understand” the typical layer-7 protocols such as gRPC, HTTP 1.1, and HTTP/2, which allows them to deal with modern applications. From an inbound and outbound perspective, we can easily define fine-grained authorizations within the mesh and control how non-meshed services can interact with meshed ones.

OSM has become an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) addon, which can easily be activated for AKS while not restricted to AKS. You can indeed leverage OSM with plain Kubernetes.