Network Service Mesh: On-Demand Connectivity Across Clouds
Shriira Press
Give any individual workload exactly the network it needs, on demand, across clusters, clouds, and on-premises — without touching the CNI.
Welcome to Network Service Mesh: On-Demand Connectivity Across Clouds.
Network Service Mesh, a CNCF sandbox project, takes a different angle on cloud-native networking than the tools most engineers already know. A CNI gives every pod one network, decided at the cluster level; a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd governs the L7 traffic that rides on top. Network Service Mesh works underneath both of them, at L2 and L3, letting an individual workload request a named Network Service and receive a private, point-to-point connection — a virtual wire — to an endpoint that may live in another cluster, another cloud, or a data center across the world. This book builds that picture from the ground up. It begins with the problem of per-workload connectivity that existing networking leaves unsolved, then introduces the network service abstraction and the virtual wire, the control-plane components (NSMgr, registry, forwarder, client, and endpoint), the request and healing flows, the SDK chain model that makes endpoints composable, the dataplanes that carry packets, security through SPIFFE and SPIRE, the headline use cases like distributed vL3 networks and scale-from-zero, interdomain federation, and finally how to run and adopt NSM in practice. By the end you will understand not just what NSM does, but why it is shaped the way it is.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press