AMEER ABBAS: Hi.
My name is Ameer Abbas.
I'm a Product Manager at Google.
And today, I'd like to talk about the value of Anthos
Service Mesh over Istio.
Anthos Service Mesh, or ASM, is a Google-managed service mesh
product based on the Istio APIs.
Istio is the most mature and prevalent open service mesh
project on the market today.
So if you're currently using Istio
or you're thinking about adopting a service mesh
architecture, you're probably wondering,
why would you consider ASM?
Well, there are three reasons for this.
Number one, support.
ASM is Google supported.
And because it's based on the Istio APIs,
at a very basic level, it's like getting first-party Google
support for your current Istio implementation.
ASM is supported on Google Cloud.
It's supported on Google Distributed
Cloud for your on-prem and edge locations.
It's also supported on Anthos clusters,
both first party and third party attached clusters,
like Amazon EKS or Azure AKS.
So whether you're building a multicluster multiregional
mesh on GCP, a hybrid mesh between GCP and your data
center locations, or a multicloud mesh,
ASM is supported on all environments.
Number two, management.
With managed ASM, Google manages the operational tasks
associated with the mesh components themselves.
As you may know, Istio is composed
of multiple components.
The main ones are a control plane, a data plane,
and certificate authority.
And because these run inside of your cluster,
you are responsible for their maintenance and management,
things like upgrades, patching, and certificate management.
With Managed ASM Managed Control Plane,
Google manages the lifecycle events associated
with the control plane.
This includes ongoing upgrades, applying CBE patches,
as well as ensuring that you are always
running a supported version.
With Managed Data Plane, Google safely
rolls out new versions of the proxies in your data plane
as your control plane gets upgraded.
And ASM comes bundled in with Mesh CA, a Google managed
and hosted certificate authority service,
providing you with a no-op experience
for your mesh workload certificate needs.
So in short, with Managed ASM, Google
manages the operations of the mesh components,
while you simply consume the mesh.
And number three, enterprise-grade features.
As you know, Istio comes with a ton of benefits.
Some of these includes enhanced security or better visibility
into your services.
But in order to take advantage of these,
you have to stitch together multiple third party
or open source solutions.
For instance, a typical Istio implementation
comes with Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, Jaeger
or Zipkin for tracing, and Kiali for topology.
And with all these components running in your environment
comes more maintenance and more management overhead.
ASM provides you with a service-centric view
for metrics, telemetry, traffic logs, tracing, and topology
right inside of Google Cloud console,
without you having to deploy or manage any additional pieces.
With Services Dashboards, out of the box,
you get standard metrics dashboards
for all of your services.
These standard metrics includes your typical SRE
golden signals, things like server requests, error rates,
and latencies.
In addition to the standard dashboards,
you can also create custom dashboards
using any of the standard or custom metrics.
For tracing, ASM integrates with Google Managed Cloud Trace.
And within Google Cloud console, you
also get a graphical topology representation of all
your interconnected mesh services.
In addition to these telemetry features,
ASM also provides you better visibility into the security
posture of your service mesh.
Security Insights ensures that you
are adhering to the recommended security best practices.
It ensures that you have network policies,
that you have encryption and authentication
with mTLS, as well as access and authorization policies for all
of your services.
Finally, and one of the biggest benefits of ASM
is the ability to take these metrics
and create SLOs to run more resilient and reliable
services.
SLO, or Service Level Objectives,
is a quantifiable way to measure the health of your services.
You can create SLOs using any of the standard metrics,
for example, availability or latency.
Or you can create SLOs using any of your own custom metrics.
And once these are in place, you can
get alerted when any of these SLOs are in risk of violation.
So to sum up, with ASM, you get first-party Google support
for your mesh, both on and off GCP.
With Managed ASM, Google manages the operational tasks
associated with the mesh components,
while you simply get to enjoy the features of the mesh.
And with enterprise-grade features,
such as Services Dashboards, Security Insights,
and Service-Based SLOs, you get to run
more manageable, observable, secure, and reliable services.
To learn more, visit cloud.google.com/anthos/service
mesh.
And why not give Quick Start on GKE a try.
Thanks for watching.
And I'll see you in the next one.