Sermant: A Proxyless Service Mesh for Java
Shriira Press
A service mesh for Java microservices that needs no sidecar — governance woven straight into the running process by a Java agent.
Welcome to Sermant: A Proxyless Service Mesh for Java.
Sermant is a CNCF sandbox project that brings service-mesh governance to Java microservices without the usual sidecar proxy. Instead of routing every request through a companion Envoy container, Sermant attaches a Java agent to your application and rewrites bytecode at startup, injecting registry, routing, flow control, and observability behaviour directly into the process. The result is governance with none of the per-hop network proxying — lower latency, lower resource cost, and no code changes to the services themselves. This book explains how that works and how to use it. We begin with the proxyless idea and the problem it answers, then open up the Java agent to see how bytecode enhancement and class isolation make it safe. From there we explore the framework core that every plugin builds on, tour the plugin ecosystem that delivers real governance, look at the Sermant Backend and dynamic configuration that drive it all, study how Sermant speaks xDS to an Istio control plane, and close with adoption patterns and where Sermant fits in the cloud-native landscape.
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