10 years ago, I learned about the idea of elastic infrastructure. Services with load balancers in front of them, hosts that come and go easily, a structured way to communicate between services.

At the time, that was nginx + manual autoscaling, then it was ELBs and autoscaling groups, now it's kubernetes and containers, maybe hosted. It's still not there.

I'm excited about the software that makes that operable at scale. It seems like a service mesh is a good idea. It seems like mutual security between services is a good idea. It seems like storing routing configuration in a separate control plane that is executed in a data plane like Envoy is a good idea.

There's a bag of software at CNCF that's loosely organized around this, but I don't think the "just deploy some code, it can scale and you can have tons of services doing that with good visibility and operability" is quite there. I'm really exicted about Envoy, but I don't think there's a good control plane for it. I'm part of a company that's working on a commercial implementation (turbinelabs.io), and Istio is in a similar space.

There's still work to be done!