Service Directory for Cloud Service Mesh

This document provides an overview of how Cloud Service Mesh and Service Directory work together to give applications in your service mesh access to services listed in the Service Directory registry.

Cloud Service Mesh is a service mesh control plane that enables global routing, load balancing, regional failover, and security for heterogeneous deployments. This includes deployments that use sidecars, edge or middle proxies, and proxyless gRPC clients.

Integrating Service Directory and Cloud Service Mesh makes services registered with Service Directory available to Cloud Service Mesh services.

Service Directory makes it easier to access and track your services in a single central registry. This includes Google Cloud services such as GKE, internal passthrough Network Load Balancers, internal Application Load Balancers, and on-premises and multicloud services. When a service producer creates a GKE service or a load balancer, the service or load balancer can automatically be registered with Service Directory through the integrations.

After a service is in Service Directory, you can configure Cloud Service Mesh to enable Cloud Service Mesh clients to access any service registered in Service Directory, such as internal passthrough Network Load Balancers and internal Application Load Balancers.

Using Service Directory's service registry with Cloud Service Mesh makes services in the service registry available to the applications in your mesh and to gateways configured by Cloud Service Mesh.

Registering your Cloud Service Mesh with Service Directory lets you do the following.

  • Make existing services available to Cloud Service Mesh
  • Improve coordination between service producers and consumers
  • Access services in a perimeter using an ingress point
  • Connect services across domains
  • Apply policies when accessing services

For detailed information about these capabilities, see Use cases for Cloud Service Mesh integration with Service Directory.

To integrate your services, you register a service with Service Directory, then bind the service to a Cloud Service Mesh backend service. After a binding is established, Cloud Service Mesh queries Service Directory to obtain information about the registered service and how that service can be reached.

For detailed information about how to set up Cloud Service Mesh with Service Directory, see Set up Cloud Service Mesh with Service Directory.

What's next