We are pleased to introduce a development release of NGINX Service Mesh (NSM), a fully integrated lightweight service mesh that leverages a data plane powered by NGINX Plus to manage container traffic in Kubernetes environments. NSM is available for free download. We hope you will try it out in your development and test environments, and look forward to your feedback on GitHub.

Adopting microservices methodologies comes with challenges as deployments scale and become more complex. Communication between the services is intricate, debugging problems can be harder, and more services imply more resources to manage.

NSM addresses these challenges by enabling you to centrally provision:

• Security – Security is more critical now than ever. Data breaches can cost organizations millions of dollars every year in lost revenue and reputation. NSM ensures all communication is mTLS‑encrypted so that there is no sensitive data on the wire for hackers to steal. Access controls enable you to define policies about which services can talk to each other.
• Traffic management – When deploying a new version of an application, you might want to limit the amount of traffic it receives at first, in case there is a bug. With NSM intelligent container traffic management you can specify policies that limit traffic to new services and slowly increase it over time. Features like rate limiting and circuit breakers give you full control over the traffic flowing through your services.
• Visualization – Managing thousands of services can be a debugging and visibility nightmare. NSM helps to reign that in with a built‑in Grafana dashboard displaying the full suite of metrics available in NGINX Plus. In addition, the Open Tracing integration enables fine‑grained transaction tracing.
• Hybrid deployments – If your enterprise is like most, your entire infrastructure doesn’t run in Kubernetes. NSM ensures legacy applications are not left out. With the NGINX Kubernetes Ingress Controller integration, legacy services can communicate with mesh services and vice versa.

NSM secures applications in a zero‑trust environment by seamlessly applying encryption and authentication to container traffic. It delivers observability and insights into transactions to help organizations deploy and troubleshoot problems quickly and accurately. It also provides fine‑grained traffic control, enabling DevOps teams to deploy and optimize application components while empowering Dev teams to build and easily connect their distributed applications.

What Is NGINX Service Mesh?

NSM consists of a unified data plane for east‑west (service-to-service) traffic and a native integration of the NGINX Plus Ingress Controller for north‑south traffic, managed by a single control plane.

The control plane is designed and optimized for the NGINX Plus data plane and defines the traffic management rules that are distributed to the NGINX Plus sidecars.

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