In 2019, we saw service mesh move beyond an experimental technology and into a solution that organizations are beginning to learn is an elemental building block for any successful Kubernetes deployment. Adoption of service mesh at scale, across companies large and small, began to gain steam. As the second wave of adopters watched the cutting edge adopters trial and succeed with service mesh technology, they too began to evaluate service mesh to address the challenges Kubernetes leaves on the table.
In tandem with growing adoption of service mesh, 2019 offered a burgeoning service mesh market. Istio and Linkerd keep chugging along, and the tooling and vendor ecosystem around Istio almost tripled throughout the year. But there were also many new players that entered the market providing alternative approaches to solving layer seven networking challenges. Meshes, such as those Kuma and Maesh offer, have emerged to provide different approaches to service mesh in order to address various edge use cases. We also saw the introduction of tools like Service Mesh Interface spec and Meshery attempt to engage an early market that is flourishing due to immense opportunity, but has yet to contract while key players are waiting for the market to choose the winners first. Adjacent projects like Network Service Mesh bring service mesh principles to lower layers of the stack.
