2025-03-30 –, The Nash
In a Kubernetes galaxy not so far away, operators face a crucial choice for managing and securing their networks: the simplicity of an Ingress controller or the power of a Service Mesh. Service Meshes promise resilient deployments with automatic retries, TLS encryption, traffic management, observability, and more. But not all meshes are created equal.
From Istio’s scalability, Linkerd’s simplicity, and Cilium’s eBPF innovation to Kuma’s multi-cluster versatility and Ambassador’s edge connectivity, each offers unique strengths. With options like sidecars or sidecar-less setups, choosing the right solution becomes a battle of priorities.
Join Henrik from Is It Observable? as he unveils a benchmark comparing these Service Mesh contenders across critical dimensions: proxy type, feature set, user experience, observability, and performance. By the end, you'll gain clarity on which Service Mesh aligns with your Kubernetes needs. May the Mesh be with you!
Join us for an in-depth exploration of service meshes, where we'll compare their capabilities across key dimensions:
Feature Support: What does each service mesh bring to the table?
Observability Journey: How effectively do they integrate and enhance observability?
Design Experience: What’s the developer and operator experience like?
Performance Behavior: How do they perform under load, and what impact do they have on resource usage and latency?
To conduct this comparison, the speaker has developed a comprehensive benchmark leveraging the Microservices Demo (Hipster Shop) and the OpenTelemetry Demo. Using the OpenTelemetry Collector, we’ll capture and analyze telemetry data across various solutions within an observability platform.
At the end of the talk, we’ll share the repository containing all the benchmarking resources, enabling attendees to replicate or build upon the results.
This session is not about declaring winners or losers—it’s about empowering you with the insights needed to make informed decisions when selecting a service mesh for your specific use case.
Henrik is a Cloud Native Advocate at Dynatrace and a CNCF Ambassador . Prior to Dynatrace, Henrik has worked more than 15 years, as Performance Engineer. Henrik Rexed Is Also one of the Organizer of the conferences named WOPR, KCD Austria and the owner of the Youtube Channel IsitObservable.