Amazon Launches AWS App Mesh

Author: Charter Global
Published: January 11, 2019

Amazon has released the AWS App Mesh, a service Mesh that is here to help make it easy to monitor and control microservices running on AWS. It simplifies and standardizes management of microservices communication traffic and gives end-to-end visibility of your application. App Mesh can currently export logs, metrics, and traces; configure routes for deployments; and eventually will include client side traffic policies – circuit breaking, retries.

App Mesh is based on the Envoy proxy, a C++ distributed service proxy designed for large service oriented architectures. Amazon chose Envoy because it is a “high performing, low memory footprint” server said Tony Pujals, AWS Senior Developer Advocate. “It has tremendous community support and battle tested in production,” he added.

App mesh can currently be used with existing or new microservice that are running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (using the Amazon EC2 launch type), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), and Kubernetes on AWS. Part of the roadmap is to have it run on AWS Fargate as well.

At the moment, the AWS App Mesh is only available in these Regions: US West (Oregon) (us-west-2), US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1), US East (Ohio) (us-east-2), and EU (Ireland) (eu-west-1). For now, there are no announcements yet on the availability dates for the other regions.

AWS App Mesh is made up of the following components:

  • Service meshA service mesh is a logical boundary for network traffic between the services that reside within it.
  • Virtual nodesA virtual node acts as a logical pointer to a particular task group, such as an ECS service or a Kubernetes deployment. When you create a virtual node, you must specify the DNS service discovery name for your task group.
  • Envoy proxy and router managerThe Envoy proxy and its router manager container images configure your microservice task group to use the App Mesh service mesh traffic rules that you set up for your virtual routers and virtual nodes. You add these containers to your task group after you have created your virtual nodes, virtual routers, and routes.
  • Virtual routersThe virtual router handles traffic for one or more service names within your mesh.
  • RoutesA route is associated with a virtual router, and it directs traffic that matches a service name prefix to one or more virtual nodes.

You can view more about AWS App Mesh by clicking here.

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