Countering Google, Microsoft Promises Its Own Open Source Service Mesh for the CNCF

"As controversy rages over the governance of Google's Istio service mesh, Microsoft has seen an opportunity to offer a simple and truly open alternative," reports InfoWorld: Microsoft has announced that it will release its own open source service mesh — called Open Service Mesh (OSM) — and transfer it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as soon as possible. This sets the Redmond-based company apart from its cloud rival Google, which recently announced that its own Istio service mesh will no longer be part of the vendor-neutral CNCF and will instead sit under Google's own Open Usage Commons foundation.

The service mesh has quickly become a vital part of the modern cloud native computing stack, as it essentially enables communication, monitoring, and load balancing between disparate parts of today's microservices-based architecture. This differs from the popular container orchestration service Kubernetes in its level of granularity. When run in tandem with Kubernetes, a service mesh enables deeper security policy and encryption enforcement and automated load balancing and circuit breaking functionality...

With this launch Microsoft is not only aligning itself with the open governance side of the debate which has been raging through the open source software community for the past few months, but is also looking to solve a customer pain point.

Open-source cloudiness

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Now you can review the source of the code that will give your data to Big Data for their own exploitation, and lose it when they fuck up or when the internet goes down. A great step forward!

Re: Open-source cloudiness

[BAReFO0t]

No, you can read some souce that they say is what's running your stuff.
You still need to believe them.
But given that you are already using a service where the whole point is that you literally have no clue where it is and who has access to it... (Third rate Bangladeshi admins at $0.15 an hour that have the best reason ever to commit crimes: Bare survival?) ... That's already implied. :)

Re:

[HiThere]

Open Source is still better....but the I don't know the terms of that license. Is what was released sufficient to allow an independent entity to set up in business, or is it merely a feeder to a closed source application? Either way I prefer open to closed, and either way I'm not likely to use it, so my preferences don't matter much.

What do we know about the big boys

[Your Average Joe]

We know Microsoft is always in for the long haul, they will never sell us a product and later tell us that we can't have it because it wasn't wildly successful. We must rely on Microsoft or bad things will happen. We must stay on Intel chips too because any other platform bad things will happen.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

We might be able to use it depending on the license, which I haven't researched. Some other Microsoft "OSS" has been under a license that effectively restricts its use.

Re:

[rtb61]

This could all be down to marketing. After Windows anal probe 10, M$ reputation in the retail market is utter shite and they are desperate (their phone business died after spending billions, completely and utterly died because they are very unpopular in retail), enough to consider abandoning the retail market to focus on the business market.

Yeees... expand your dependence on us ...

[BAReFO0t]

It's alright if we call it "the cloud" ... Outsource all your computing to us. Be our bitch!

No wonder the most popular language is Python. It's all snakes and rodents!

Microsoft is running Azure on Service Fabric

[lamer01]

That is not a secret.. Are they talking about something else here?

Finally...

[rml1997]

I've been waiting patiently for a sign of the end of days. Microsoft as the heroes of open source and Google as the villains. Couldn't have imagined a clearer sign!