Reliable/Secured/Observable Micro Services architecture using Kong API Gateway & Service Mesh pattern.
Life is a mesh. And, so is the case with network communication.
What is Service Mesh design pattern?
It’s an Infrastructure layer related design pattern, which handles inter-service communication in service oriented architecture. Service mesh as a pattern can be applied on any architecture (i.e., monolithic or micro service-oriented) and on any platform (i.e., VMs, containers, Kubernetes).
When should you apply Service Mesh?
- For Service-to-Service communication
- For Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) & Layer 4 (TCP) communications at service level.
- To achieve High Reliability. Health checks (a URL that a monitoring service can “ping” to determine the health of the application) help in identifying the available service endpoint. Service discovery.
- To enforce security rules/checks on API Traffic. API Authentication.
- Observability. Metrics. Loggings.
What is not addressed by Service Mesh?
- When you want to expose API as a product to external clients (Org outsiders).
- When you want to expose API as a product to internal clients (Org insiders).
- When you want to do Full Lifecycle API Management (API design phase to deploy phase, API gateway, etc.)
How did we design a solution using Kong as a Service Mesh?
- Kong acted as a proxy alongside your services. This is also known as a sidecar pattern. The sidecars abstract the complexity away from the application and handle the functionalities like service discovery, traffic management, load balancing, circuit breaking, etc.
- Easy to scale horizontally.
- When any new VM hosting services, adds into the system, Kong config required to be updated with new VM.
Why did we embrace this approach?
We don’t have all containerized services. While migration of all services to be getting containerized needs time, this solution helped us to overcome the important challenges like reliability/load balancing/failover strategy. We achieved the critical objectives in no time with the help of Kong API Gateway.
That’s it for now. If you found this article useful, please clap. Also, you can leave your constructive comment below.
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