Microsoft pushed further into the increasingly entertaining service mesh space with its Open Service Mesh (OSM) project that builds on its already established Service Mesh Interface (SMI) initiative. The launch comes just weeks after Google made a controversial hosting decision for its Istio service mesh platform.

Michelle Noorali, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, explained in a blog post that the open source OSM project is designed as a “lightweight and extensible service mesh that runs on Kubernetes.” It provides a control plane that is compatible with the SMI specification, and it taps the widely used Envoy proxy for the data plane.

A service mesh is a dedicated layer for managing, controlling, and monitoring service-to-service communication within an application. The use of a service mesh has become increasingly important for the construction of containers supporting microservice architectures.

OSM allows users to configure traffic shifting for common deployment methods, uses mutual transport layer security (mTLS) to secure service-to-service communication within the microservices environment, and enforces access control policies for services. It also has observing metrics for debugging and monitoring of services, can integrate with native or external certification management platforms, and uses automatic sidecar injection to onboard application onto the mesh environment.

Tom Petrocelli, a research fellow at Amalgam Insights, explained in an email to SDxCentral that the model was interesting in that the OSM “handles all the main service mesh control plane functions while allowing for special needs extensions using the SMI. So, it’s going to be open source, open governance, and open design.”

Microsoft did clarify that the special needs extensions mentioned by Petrocelli are "handled by allowing bailout to raw Envoy APIs.”

Microsoft unveiled the SMI project last year. It provides developers with interoperability across different service mesh technologies running on Kubernetes. It does this by defining a set of common, portable APIs that support interoperability across service mesh technologies like Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect.

This interoperability remains an important cornerstone for the service mesh space as there has yet to be a platform that has gained a dominate market share.

Noorali also noted that Microsoft was already moving to have OSM housed within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) alongside SMI. This is a significant move following Google’s recent decision to house Istio within its newly developed Open Usage Commons (OUC) group instead of in CNCF. Istio was viewed by many as becoming that service mesh platform that the industry would rally around. But, Google’s move with Istio has ended that rally.

Google made that decision last month based on what it said were concerns over how traditional open source organizations handle trademark issues. However, some within the open source community said Google’s decision with Istio and fellow open source projects Angular and Gerritt was a power play by Google and would hinder the development of a standardized service mesh platform.

“Our belief is that Google is pragmatically seeking to retain more control over them and better address the potential commercial benefits: Kubernetes has gone stratospheric, yet there has not been an equivalent payback in terms of Google Cloud Platform sales,” 451 Research noted in a recent report.

Petrocelli noted that OSM was “clearly an Istio competitor and sits in the same place in the ecosystem,” and that OSM being moved into CNCF and having a big vendor like Microsoft back a service mesh platform could be a compelling option to all of the other uncertainty.

“Competitors are either a closed and small ecosystem (Linkerd), open core (Consul), or in turmoil with IP management in question (Istio),” he explained. “This places this new project in the catbird seat. They can claim flexible architecture and extreme openness. All with the backing of one of the biggest of industry giant (which Linkerd and Consul can’t claim), Microsoft.”

Petrocelli said that he doubts the OSM launch timing was directly related to Google’s move with Istio. But he does think the projects overall objective “is in response to the ongoing issues with Istio not becoming a CNCF project (and) also part of a longer-term strategy that included SMI.”

“This new project gets to start off with an open approach to extension via the SMI,” Petrocelli said. “That’s going to help in the future.”

UPDATED: This story has been updated with a comment from Microsoft clarifying how the OSM works.