The purpose of this book is to walk you through the service mesh architecture. We will cover three main open source service mesh providers: Istio, Linkerd, and Consul. First of all, we will talk about how the evolution of technology led to Service Mesh. In this chapter, we will cover the application development journey from monolithic to microservices.
The technology landscape that fueled the growth of the monolithic framework is based on the technology stack that became available 20+ years ago. As hardware and software virtualization improved significantly, a new wave of innovation started with the adoption of microservices in 2011 by Netflix, Amazon, and other companies. This trend started by redesigning monolithic applications into small and independent microservices.
Before we get started on monolithic versus microservices, let's take a step back and review what led to where we are today before the inception of microservices. This chapter will go through the brief evolution of early computer machines, hardware virtualization, software virtualization, and transitioning from monolithic to microservices-based applications. We will try to summarize the journey from the early days to where we are today.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Early computer machines
- Monolithic applications
- Microservices applications