ajessup

I love this line - one of my favorites of the show. Thanks for sharing.

While there are plenty of folks who have reason to push a repatriation narrative, and there will always be examples (Dropbox!), I'll believe it's real when cloud providers like AWS and Google start eating into their considerable margin and begin meaningfully dropping prices again.

This sounds a lot like my daughter (3yo). She likes to play up, but also craves approval from her parents and stern words can be devastating to her.

The best approach we've found is to progressively and predictably escalate our language and tone. Starting with a friendly "now, now" and ending with time out if she hasn't fixed her behavior. At some point along the way she usually recognizes The Voice and course corrects voluntarily without needing to be reprimanded.

As with all thing parenting, YMMV ;)

Supporting North/South is how they have traditionally been marketed, but not how they are actually used much of the time. Inside enterprise they are often used as an internal "service catalog" and are effectively a shim providing discovery and consistency over a bunch of fairly scoped internal services.

One reason for the explosive interest in service mesh over the last 24 months that this article glosses over is that it's deeply threatening to a range of existing industries, that are now responding.

Most immediately to API gateways (eg. Apigee, Kong, Mulesoft), which provide similar value to SM (in providing centralized control and auditing of an organization's East-West service traffic) but implemented differently. This is why Kong, Apigee, nginx etc. are all shipping service mesh implementations now before their market gets snatched away from them.

Secondly to cloud providers, who hate seeing their customers deploy vendor-agnostic middleware rather than use their proprietary APIs. None of them want to get "Kubernetted" again. Hence Amazon's investment in the very Istio-like "AppMesh" and Microsoft (who already had "Service Fabric") attempt to do an end run around Istio with the "Service Mesh Interface" spec. Both are part of a strategy to ensure if you are running a service mesh the cloud provider doesn't cede control.

Then there's a slew of monitoring vendors who aren't sure if SM is a threat (by providing a bunch of metrics "for free" out of the box) or an opportunity to expand the footprint of their own tools by hooking into SM rather than require folks to deploy their agents everywhere.

Finally there's the multi-billion dollar Software Defined Networking market - who are seeing a lot of their long term growth and value being threatened by these open source projects that are solving at Layer 7 (and with much more application context) what they had been solving for at Layer 3-4. VMWare NSX already have a SM implementation (NSX-SM) that is built on Istio and while I have no idea what Nutanix et al are doing I wouldn't be surprised if they launched something soon.

It will be interesting to see where it all nets out. If Google pulls off the same trick that they did with Kubernetes and creates a genuinely independent project with clean integration points for a wide range of vendors then it could become the open-source Switzerland we need. On the other hand it could just as easily become a vendor-driven tire fire. In a year or so we'll know.

This is great science writing. Straightforward, factual, and with context to help folks put the findings into perspective. It's a refreshing change from the hyperbolic coverage of scientific topics one often finds in more mainstream media.

The author's point is not that schema changes are hard - but rather that versioning schema changes are hard.