If you ask Solo.io CEO Idit Levine, 2023 will be the year service mesh technology goes mainstream. She predicts the continued growth of cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices – and the complexity of managing them – will push the service mesh space to its potential in 2023.

Service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that addresses the complexity of modern distributed architectures and the challenges that creates for developers and operators. Solo.io recently introduced its Gloo Platform, combining API gateway, service mesh, security, and cloud-native networking into one application networking platform.

"This is what everybody's talking about," Levine told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. "Even if they're trying to do this, and they do have a gateway and they do have a mesh, usually they are totally different. Maybe they build on different building blocks, and so on. I think that what's special about what we're doing. ... The advantage of what we built here is that it will allow us to scale way faster."

Levine dug into her 2023 expectations for service mesh over an email-conducted interview.

SDxCentral: What are your predictions for the service mesh space in 2023?

Levine: Service mesh is evolving into its second phase, cloud-native 2.0, as some early Kubernetes and microservices trends mature. As companies become more comfortable with Kubernetes and microservices, they begin to give more freedom to development teams, which leads to more clusters. Managing that sprawl is an area where many companies will begin to understand the value of advanced service mesh capabilities.

SDxCentral: What do enterprise customers need from a service mesh, and what will be their top priorities in 2023?

Levine: Customers are looking for more flexibility from their service mesh, more options to either get started or make things easier for adoption. Functionality like Istio Ambient Mesh will help with this.

Customers are also realizing that in a cloud-native world, API gateway and service mesh have quite a bit of overlapping functionality and are looking for these two capabilities to be less siloed and more integrated. This will lead to a big rethinking of what the integrated architecture should look like – control plane, data plane, modularity of the architecture, etc.

How to best manage observability in a distributed environment is still an evolving area, at both layer 4 and layer 7, but observability will remain a top priority for enterprise IT organizations in 2023.

SDxCentral: How do you predict the Istio community will evolve in 2023?

Innovation will continue to be rapid in Istio as the community grows. Istio was founded in 2017, and recently accepted as a CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] incubator project, reflecting production adoption and maturity of the project. The project has over 6,000 contributors from over 1,000 companies and having CNCF’s governance will only expand the active, diverse community and skillset that surrounds Istio.

Observability, management and zero-trust security remain top enterprise priorities and at the heart of service mesh. Istio transparently adds these capabilities to applications without adding them to your code.