Implementing Observability in a Service Mesh

Implementing Observability in a Service Mesh

摘要

In this article I’d like to share my experiences on how one can improve the observability of services through the use of the Consul Connect Service Mesh and later I’ll explain my justification for using it compared to other alternatives. Just for a recap, a service mesh allows you to route HTTP traffic through proxies that are deployed as sidecar containers to a service. These proxies can then expose metrics, logs and traces that allow you to gain rich visibility into the system thus making it more efficient to debug applications quickly and easily. Consul Connect, in addition provides service-to-service authorization and encryption using mutual TLS and uses Envoy as the data plane for the data transmission. In terms of observability, I will cover basic Layer 7 metrics, access logs and distributed tracing using Prometheus, Grafana, AWS CloudWatch Logs and AWS X-Ray.