Organizations are adopting microservices for building distributed applications that support agile delivery and scalable deployment, on-premise or in the cloud. However, the rapid adoption comes with its share of challenges. Product development teams should strategize to overcome these challenges while designing a product, and not as an afterthought.
This paper presents strategies to overcome these challenges using an Open Source framework, Istio.
Microservices adoption trends
A survey conducted by NGINX reveals that 70% of organizations are using or exploring microservices. The microservices architecture market is expected to reach $32.01 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of around 16.17%. Several large enterprises today are bringing microservices into their mainstream and soon there will be exponential growth across industries.
Microservices adoption challenges
The challenges stem from the fact that each application has multiple microservices, multiple versions, multiple instances and perhaps is implemented across different technologies.
This causes:
Microservices technology stack – orchestration and beyond
Service Management using service mesh – enables better insights and control
Service level control over the traffic flow, configurable traffic routing, detailed telemetry, constant monitoring, graceful handling of failures, strong authentication and access control are needed to enable better insights and control across all services. Benefits of service mesh architecture here will be:
Various models that support a service mesh pattern are :
Library: Each microservice has a library that includes the service mesh features. Mostly suited if services are written in one language. E.g. Hysterix
Node agent: An agent runs on every node, realizing the service mesh features and can serve varied types of workloads. The technology can be heterogeneous. E.g. Kubelet, Linkerd's mesh
Sidecar: In this pattern there is a sidecar that is attached to the main application, co-locating the related tasks and complementing the main application by providing the supporting service mesh features. E.g. Istio with Envoy, NginMesh with Istio
Out of these, the sidecar pattern has some advantages that makes it a preferred choice in certain frameworks.
Service Management through Istio service mesh
Istio, created by Google, IBM and Lyft, is a service mesh that provides behavioural insights and operational control over the service mesh using (a) a data plane and (b) a control plane (refer to the diagram below).
Wipro’s capabilities and accelerators
The Scalable Platform Engineering team in Wipro has developed microservices based products and platforms across industries. We help customers accelerate development of microservices based applications, with our capabilities such as:
Conclusion
Organizations, using microservices strategy for product modernization and new product development, can benefit by adopting a service mesh framework, like Istio. Wipro, with its deep expertise and IP, is excited to work with organizations on their journey of microservices adoption, and deliver great products with faster time to market and reduced costs.
Roopa Shenoy M.
Senior Architect – Product Software & Software Services,
Industrial & Engineering Services, Wipro Limited
Roopa has 17 years’ experience in EngineeringNXT and Microsoft Technologies. She has expertise in delivery, pre-sales and solution development of enterprise and system level software across industry domains. She is currently handling key initiatives around scalable platforms and providing solutions in product development, product modernization and product sustenance areas.
Radhakrishna Singuru
DMTS - Senior Member - Product Software & Software Services,
Industrial & Engineering Services, Wipro Limited
Radha has 22 years’ experience in application and system software development in varied areas, ranging from Cloud and virtualization technologies, scalable platforms, SDN, L2/L3 switching and stacking software, etc., across multiple industry domains. He currently heads the Scalable Platforms, Software Products and Payments Practice.