What is Anthos Service Mesh?

Anthos Service Mesh is a suite of tools that helps you monitor and manage a reliable service mesh on-premises or on Google Cloud.

What is a service mesh?

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that enables managed, observable, and secure communication across your services, letting you create robust enterprise applications made up of many microservices on your chosen infrastructure. Service meshes factor out all the common concerns of running a service such as monitoring, networking, and security, with consistent, powerful tools, making it easier for service developers and operators to focus on creating and managing great applications for their users.

Anthos Service Mesh is powered by Istio, a highly configurable and powerful open source service mesh platform, with tools and features that enable industry best practices. Anthos Service Mesh is deployed as a uniform layer across your entire infrastructure. Service developers and operators can use its rich feature set without making a single change to application code.

To find out more about Istio and how to use it, see the Istio documentation.

How can Anthos Service Mesh help me?

With Anthos Service Mesh, you get an GKE Enterprise tested and supported distribution of Istio, letting you create and deploy a service mesh on Google Cloud or on GKE on VMware with full Google support. We also provide a configuration profile with recommended settings for using Anthos Service Mesh on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and another profile designed for GKE on VMware.

To learn about the service mesh features we support, see Supported features.

Managed components

Anthos Service Mesh has a suite of additional features and tools that help you observe and manage secure, reliable services in a unified way.

Observability features

The Anthos Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console provides the following insights into your service mesh:

  • Service metrics and logs for HTTP traffic within your mesh's GKE cluster are automatically ingested to Google Cloud.

  • Preconfigured service dashboards give you the information you need to understand your services.

  • In-depth telemetry lets you dig deep into your metrics and logs, filtering and slicing your data on a wide variety of attributes.

  • Service-to-service relationships at a glance help you understand who connects to each service and the services that each service depends on.

  • You can quickly see the communication security posture not only of your service, but its relationships to other services.

  • Cloud Monitoring lets you dig deeper into your service metrics and combine them with other metrics.

  • Service level objectives (SLOs) give you insight into the health of your services. You can easily define an SLO and alert on your own standards of service health.

Security features

  • You can enable mutual TLS (mTLS) across your service mesh, either during installation or incrementally, to ensure strong authentication and encryption between services.

  • You don't need to manage a certificate authority. Anthos Service Mesh certificate authority (Mesh CA) is a Google-managed, highly available and secure service that replaces Citadel for Anthos Service Mesh customers on GKE on Google Cloud. Mesh CA issues mTLS certificates for workloads running in Anthos Service Mesh.

  • Anthos Service Mesh integrates with Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP).

What's next?