I believe the confusion arises because the following:
- there is overlap in technologies used (proxies)
- there is overlap in capabilities (traffic control, routing, metric collection, security/policy enforcement, etc.)
- a belief that “service mesh” replaces API management
- a misunderstanding of the capabilities of a service mesh
- some service meshes have their own gateways
The last bullet is especially confusing to the discussion.
– Christian Posta: Do I Need an API Gateway if I Use a Service Mesh?
Good post, especially relevant for my current work where we’re deep diving into Kubernetes/Istio land. Previously, I was working on products that had an API Gateway as a main component. I noticed right away a lot of overlap between what Istio provides and products like Apigee, Kong, etc. provide as API Gateways. Confusing. Christian’s post helps identify the overlaps while digging into the differences. -Josh