Deciphering the Future: Untangling the Complexities of Hybrid Cloud Mesh and Service Mesh

Hybrid Cloud Mesh, now generally available, is transforming application connectivity across hybrid multicloud environments. To better understand the nuances of these essential components in the realm of modern enterprise connectivity, let’s compare a hybrid cloud mesh with a typical service mesh. This comparison is valuable because, although different in approach, both solutions focus on application-centric connectivity.

Before comparing, let’s briefly revisit the concept of hybrid cloud mesh and service mesh in general.

Hybrid Cloud Mesh

Hybrid cloud mesh is a modern, application-centric connectivity solution that is simple, secure, scalable, and seamless. Create a secure network overlay for distributed applications across cloud, edge, and on-premises and holistically address the challenges of deploying services across hybrid multicloud.

service mesh

A service mesh is a composable infrastructure layer that manages all connectivity requirements between microservices. It manages communication between services, providing essential functions such as service discovery, load balancing, encryption, and authentication.

Language libraries for connectivity have partial and inconsistent implementations of traffic management features, and are difficult to maintain and upgrade. A service mesh eliminates these libraries and allows services to focus on their business logic and communicate with other services without adding connection logic in the field.

Hybrid Cloud Mesh and Service Mesh: A Comparative Analysis

1. Connection range

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Extend connectivity to applications, regardless of form factor deployment, beyond microservices within containerized applications and across on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud infrastructure. Its scope covers a wider range of deployment scenarios.
• service mesh: Primarily focuses on managing communication between microservices within a containerized environment. Many service meshes are starting to look outward, but multi-cluster all connected.

2. Multicloud connection

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Seamlessly connects applications across hybrid multicloud environments to provide an integrated solution for organizations with diverse cloud infrastructure.
• service mesh: Typically designed for applications deployed within a specific cloud or on-premises environment. Although many service meshes have expanded their reach to multicloud connectivity, they are not fully optimized.

3. Transportation engineering capabilities

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Utilizes waypoints to support route optimization for cost, latency, bandwidth, etc. Enhance application performance and security.
• service mesh: No traffic engineering function. It primarily focuses on internal traffic management within a microservice architecture.

4. Express connection intent

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Allows users to express their connection intent through UI or CLI, providing an intuitive and user-friendly experience with a minimal learning curve.
• service mesh: Users must implement complex communication patterns in the sidecar proxy using configuration files. Operating a service mesh involves complexity and requires a significant learning curve. The team of experts responsible for managing the service mesh must continually invest time and effort to effectively utilize and maintain the service mesh. Due to its steep learning curve and the tools required (e.g. integration with CI/CD pipelines or 0-2 day automation), service meshes can only be adopted once customers have achieved a certain scale to make their investment worthwhile.

5. Management and control area

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Adopt a centralized SaaS-based management and control plane to improve ease of use and provide observability. Users interact with Mesh Manager through a user-friendly UI or CLI.
• service mesh: Control planes are distributed across microservices, often utilizing distributed management that requires coordination for effective management.

6. Integration with gateway

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Integration with a variety of gateways promotes adaptability to a variety of use cases and promotes future-proofing for future gateway technologies.
• service mesh: Sidecar proxy is mainly used for communication between microservices within the same cluster. Typically, the functionality of the proxy expands to meet your needs.

7. Search for applications

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Mesh Manager continuously discovers and updates your multicloud deployment infrastructure, automating the discovery of deployed applications and services.
• service mesh: Typically relies on service registration and discovery mechanisms within a containerized environment.

8. Dynamic network maintenance

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Automatically adapts to dynamic changes in workload placement or environment, enabling resilient and reliable connectivity at scale without manual intervention.
• Service mesh: Managing service meshes that connect applications across multicloud is typically a day 2 burden due to the operational complexity required to manage dynamic infrastructure changes. Manual tuning is required to accommodate changes in microservices deployed in a multicloud environment. Apart from infrastructure changes, upgrades, security fixes, and other tasks require significant effort to keep it running. This takes up a lot of time and leaves little time left to implement new features.

9. Infrastructure overhead

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: The data plane consists of a limited number of edge gateways and waypoints.
• Service mesh: The sidecar proxy architecture, which requires one sidecar proxy for every workload, introduces significant overhead.

10. Multi-tenancy

• Hybrid Cloud Mesh: Provides powerful multi-tenancy. You can also create sub-tenants to maintain separation between different departments or verticals within your organization.
• service mesh: May lack the ability to accommodate multi-tenancy or sub-tenant architecture. Few customers are able to create separate service meshes per cluster to keep tenants separate. So, to connect different service meshes, you need to deploy and manage your own gateway.

Take the next step with hybrid cloud mesh

We are excited to present a technology preview of Hybrid Cloud Mesh, which enables the use of Red Hat® Service Interconnect gateways to simplify application connectivity and security across platforms, clusters, and clouds. Announced at the Red Hat Summit on May 23, 2023, Red Hat Service Interconnect creates connections between services, applications, and workloads across hybrid mission-critical environments.

We are just beginning our journey to build a comprehensive hybrid multicloud automation solution for enterprises. Hybrid cloud mesh is more than just a network solution. It is designed to be a transformative force, enabling hybrid cloud adoption and transforming the way multicloud environments are leveraged by helping enterprises derive maximum value from modern application architectures. We hope you will join us on that journey.

Learn more about hybrid cloud mesh