The Open Service Mesh (OSM) project announced it will be archived as its maintainers are moving to work on the Istio service mesh – and OSM's lip service to Istio suggested its users follow suit. This move represents both the complexity and competitive nature of the service mesh market, according to Buoyant CEO William Morgan, whose company created and maintains rival service mesh Linkerd.

The OSM team said it plans to "work more closely with the Istio community" after the OSM project's archival, and it plans to center its "team resources on the Istio project," which recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

"I read [the announcement] as the maintainers of OSM are . . . going to go work on Istio now, and the project's going to be archived, and that was it," Morgan told SDxCentral. But OSM "doesn't become part of Istio," which removes technological similarities as a reason to jump from OSM to Linkerd's rival.

From Morgan's perspective, OSM's archival signals long-awaited consolidation of the service mesh market, which grew to 47% adoption within the CNCF end user community in 2022. In addition to the cloud native technology's maturation, "fundamentally, building a service mesh is really hard," Morgan said. "Making it easy for customers to adopt is really hard, and it's a very competitive environment."

After the "explosion of service meshes" that "all seem to deliver the same stuff," this consolidation could just be the beginning, he posited. "The reality is [that] it's a tough and very competitive market."

To that point, Linkerd announced its intention to help OSM customers migrate to Linkerd. "I'm hoping that we can step in there and say, hey, look. If you're an OSM customer, don't worry. We've got you covered," Morgan said. "There's a future for you," he promised.

Even though OSM's announcement ignored the fact Istio isn't the only other service mesh in existence, Morgan argued Linkerd is the most fitting place for OSM orphans who want to feel at home.

"Linkerd and OSM have always been spiritual siblings," Morgan said. The OSM project was focused on simplicity and delivering an easier service mesh experience while reducing operational complexity. "Whether they were able to deliver on that or not, I don't know. I never used it. But certainly, that's the same story that Linkerd has been telling almost since its inception," he said.

Beyond the philosophical similarities, Linkerd's technological architecture aligns closely OSM, according to Morgan. Users either adopted OSM after its 2020 debut because "simplicity was a virtue that appealed" to them or because Microsoft "Azure was your environment of choice, and you wanted [a service mesh] that you knew was going to be really well supported," he explained.

According to Morgan, his company's service mesh is "the ideal destination for OSM adopters" because Linkerd shines in both those areas: simplicity and support for Azure.

He touted Linkerd's Azure integration and Buoyant's own use of the service mesh in production on Azure, noting that "Linkerd gets tested in every possible way on Azure." That means OSM adopters using Microsoft's cloud services can "have a very high confidence level that [Linkerd] is going to work for you."

Linkerd also claims to be a great fit for multi-cloud or hybrid environments, which has been one of the technology's major growth areas in the past year. Adopters are using the service mesh to tie together Kubernetes clusters that exist in "potentially very heterogeneous environments" like multiple cloud, on-premises, or "any permutation" of those locations, he said.

"As long as there's Kubernetes," Linkerd will work, Morgan explained, touting the service mesh's "understandable model for cross-cluster communication." It also offers "the same security guarantees that we're providing within the cluster," like authorization policies, cryptographic identity "and all that good stuff," he added. "We can do that in a way that's really transparent to the application."