Ask HN: How would you implement service mesh in a large enterprise?

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How would you implement a service mesh for a large enterprise that already has hundreds of microservices? For some background, the existing microservices are deployed in a variety of ways (VMs, containers and serverless) and primarily use HTTP/JSON to communicate. Although the services are primarily hosted in AWS the implementation must be cloud-agnostic.

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IMHO the operational cost of a service mesh only really makes sense in the context of Kubernetes. A service mesh works by deploying lots of proxies everywhere; in Kubernetes you can do that very cheaply but outside of Kubernetes you're going to have to do some work.

So: I would start with installing something like Linkerd in a Kubernetes environment and work outwards from there.

I would use an open source solution if possible. A quick search shows that lstio or consul could perhaps be part of the solution. A proprietary platform would have to be a lot better than these tools.

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