Modern, cloud-first application development, at least on Azure, has become almost dependent on Kubernetes. Technologies such as Virtual Kubelets, the AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), and the Azure Service Fabric Mesh are key to building scalable distributed applications on Azure, using containers to deploy and manage microservices.
Looking at Azure’s Kubernetes tools, it’s clear that Microsoft is doing a lot of work in and around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, working on all aspects of the open source framework. We shouldn’t be surprised; Microsoft hired one of the founders of the Kubernetes project and then acquired Deis, a significant vendor. The Deis team is behind one of the latest Azure contributions to the Kubernetes ecosystem, the Service Mesh Interface (SMI).
Introducing service meshes
It’s perhaps best to first explain what a service mesh is and why it’s important to any Kubernetes-based application.