In this chapter, we learned how the service mesh is evolving and that the SMI is in its infancy. It is worth mentioning that the SMI, in terms of standards and abstraction, plays an important role for different service providers so that they can use a common standard. We also covered SPIFFE as a specification, which provides a secure naming convention for the workload so that it can be run in a zero-trust network. Istio has implemented SPIFFE through its control plane to provide a security infrastructure where a certificate's time-to-live could be as small as 15 minutes and maintain the PKI as a self-service model.
From this point on, we'll look at each of the different service mesh implementations. However, before we do that, we will build a demo environment so that we can practice using each of the service meshes on our own Windows laptop or Apple MacBook...