Containous launched a new open source service mesh, cleverly (akwardly?) dubbed Maesh that the company said will jump start broader adoption of service meshes.

“Service meshes have been a strong trend of late, but we think adoption is still not taking off as much as it should,” Containous CEO Emile Vauge explained in an email to SDxCentral. “A couple reasons behind this are lack of maturity in existing solutions and their overall complexity.”

Maesh is built in Containous’ Traefik “reverse-proxy” cloud-native edge router platform. It’s designed to help developers connect, secure, and monitor traffic to and from their microservices-based applications.

Damien Duportal, a developer advocate for Containous, explained that Maesh uses the CoreDNS platform installed by default in Kubernetes. CoreDNS is domain name system (DNS) server that provides service discovery in cloud native deployments.

This allows for the use of the Maesh endpoints instead of the standard Kubernetes service endpoints. Duportal explained that users can decide to run those endpoints, and if they do, then the Maesh endpoints run “side-by-side with user services."

“This gives more confidence since users know that they are able to test and revert back to the user services: they should be happy with the result,” Duportal wrote.

A service mesh is a dedicated layer for managing, controlling, and monitoring service-to-service communication within an application. They are becoming increasingly important as adoption and use of containers to support microservices continues to grow.

Containous' Maesh tackles these issues by supporting observability; multi-protocol support for HTTP layer and TCP layer; traffic management for load balancing, retries and failovers, circuit breakers and rate limits; and access controls for security.

Vauge said simplicity and familiarity are what make Maesh different from other service mesh platforms on the market like Istio and Linkerd.

Istio, which was established in mid-2017 with backing from Google, Lyft, and IBM, has since seen rapid adoption. Istio sits at the network level and uses a substrate for microservices development and maintenance. This allows for the decoupling of management from application development.

However, Istio is not part of the official Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project landscape, which is where Kubernetes is housed.

CNCF does house the Linkerd service mesh that is most often viewed as a more mature alternative to Istio. Linkerd was originally developed within Twitter and adopted into CNCF in 2017, though much of its ongoing development work is handled by Buoyant.

There are also efforts to align interoperability among service mesh platforms. One of those is being led by Microsoft, which earlier this year spearheaded the launch of the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification. This is targeted at providing developers with interoperability across different service mesh technologies running on Kubernetes.

Vauge said that Maesh supports the SMI efforts.

“We deeply believe that the best infrastructure products are open and free from vendor lock-in,” Vauge explained. “SMI is an effort to define standard specifications for service meshes and being compliant to SMI will make both Maesh and the specifications stronger.”

The Containous Maesh platform will also be “full open sourced,” Vauge added. “And by that we mean the code and, above all, the governance. Our ambition is to continue to bootstrap smart and innovative projects that the community will adopt and lead.”