Red Hat has nearly made good on plans to make its OpenShift Service Mesh platform available to all. The company said the platform, which is based on the Istio, Kiali, and Jaeger projects, will make it easier to deploy microservices-based application architectures.

The OpenShift Service Mesh handles service-to-service communication of Kubernetes-orchestrated applications running on Red Hat’s OpenShift 4 platform. It includes service observability and visualization of the mesh topology that allows an IT organization to enforce service security and communication policies across data centers and the cloud.

It uses Istio and Kiali for the creation and management of a service mesh and Jaeger for OpenTracing visibility. It can also help manage north-south traffic flow between application endpoints and the service backend when deployed with Red Hat’s 3Scale API Management tool.

The Red Hat product is deployed using its Kubernetes Operators, which is basically a controller that runs Kubernetes for a particular application. The company inherited the Operators Framework as part of its $250 million acquisition of CoreOS last year.

The service mesh tool was initially announced last September. That included a limited launch, and the company hinted at a general availability launch in 2019. It was then hyped again as part of a broader OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) update in May, which said the service mesh launch was still set for this year. Today’s announcement teases that availability date out a bit more by stating it will be generally available “in the coming weeks.”

The Istio support further bolsters that platform’s presence in the Kubernetes landscape. It provides developers with visibility into microservices without the need to change application code. 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.

Istio was established in mid-2017 with backing from Google, Lyft, and IBM, and has since seen rapid adoption. However, Istio is not part of the official Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project landscape, which is where Kubernetes is housed. Envoy, however, which is a service proxy used by Istio, is a graduated project at CNCF alongside Kubernertes.

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.

Istio made a big development push a year ago when it hit its 1.0 release. That mark usually signifies a software platform’s readiness for general deployments. However, some noted that even with the 1.0 release, Istio was not quite fully baked.

“I would say it was premature,” noted Christian Posta, senior principal architect at Red Hat, on the 1.0 release. “On the other hand, until you hit 1.0 people don’t give something a lot of attention. Even through it could have benefited from a few more months of work, at some point you have to ship it.”

The platform has obviously had time to solidify over the past year, thus the OpenShift Service Mesh tease, which has led to broader adoption.

“At present, Istio seems to have the mindshare as more vendors are working on commercial versions than are for Linkerd,” noted Amalgam Insights in a report earlier this year. “In fact, the ecosystem is forming more rapidly around Istio than Linkerd, which bodes better for Istio.”

Tom Petrocelli, a research fellow at Amalgam Insights, wrote in that report that the ongoing "battle" between Istio and Linkerd for service mesh mindshare could act “as a drag on the market.”

“It introduces unnecessary conflict, confusion, and distraction,” Petrocelli wrote. “Not only is this unfortunate but unnecessary. There is plenty of headroom for many vendors and approaches.”

Another possible service mesh approach is the Microsoft-led Service Mesh Interface project that launched in May. That project is attempting to define a set of common, portable APIs that support interoperability across service mesh technologies like Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect that run on Kubernetes. That will allow developers to maintain application portability and flexibility regardless of the service mesh product they select.

Red Hat was among a number of vendors that jumped on board that project’s launch alongside Linkerd, HashiCorp, Solo.io, Kinvolk, Weaveworks, Aspen Mesh, Canonical, Docker, Pivotal, Rancher, and VMware. Linkerd integrated SMI support into its 2.4 release last month.