ADC

Service mesh

October 27, 2023

Contributed by:

C S

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication for cloud-native applications using APIs. It provides a way to connect, secure, and monitor your microservices. Citrix provides two solutions to meet your service mesh requirements:

Service mesh lite
Service mesh (Citrix ADC integration with Istio)

Service mesh lite

A full-fledged service-mesh implementation is complex and requires a steep learning curve. If you are looking for a simplified implementation of a service mesh with similar benefits, Citrix offers a solution called service mesh lite with lesser complexity. In this solution, a Citrix ADC CPX runs as a centralized load balancer in the Kubernetes cluster and load balances East-West traffic among microservices. Citrix ADC CPX enforces policies for inbound and inter-container traffic.

The following diagram shows a service mesh lite architecture.

Service mesh lite

For information, see the service mesh lite documentation.

Service mesh (Citrix ADC integration with Istio)

Citrix provides a service mesh solution by integrating Citrix ADC with Istio. Istio, an open source and platform-independent service mesh, is one of the most popular service mesh implementations. By integrating Citrix ADC with Istio, you can take advantage of the Citrix ADC features to secure and optimize the traffic for applications in the service mesh.

Citrix ADC can be integrated with Istio in the following ways:

Citrix ADC MPX, VPX, or CPX as an Istio Ingress Gateway to the service mesh to expose traffic to the Kubernetes cluster.
Citrix ADC CPX as a sidecar proxy with application containers in the service mesh to control communication between applications.

You can use either integration independently or you can combine both ways to have a unified data plane solution.

The following diagram shows a service mesh architecture.

Service mesh

Service mesh is ideal for highly secure applications and also offers the following benefits.

Offers fine-grained (modularized) traffic management per container
Ensures richer observability, analytics, and security (Mutual TLS) due to sidecar implementation
Enables automated canary deployment for each container with embedded Citrix ADC CPX
Supports cloud portability
Allows offloading of some of the functions performed by applications to the sidecar
Provides lower sidecar latency
Provides integrations with open-source tools
Offers scalability

For more information, see the Citrix ADC integration with Istio documentation.

The official version of this content is in English. Some of the Cloud Software Group documentation content is machine translated for your convenience only. Cloud Software Group has no control over machine-translated content, which may contain errors, inaccuracies or unsuitable language. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, suitability, or correctness of any translations made from the English original into any other language, or that your Cloud Software Group product or service conforms to any machine translated content, and any warranty provided under the applicable end user license agreement or terms of service, or any other agreement with Cloud Software Group, that the product or service conforms with any documentation shall not apply to the extent that such documentation has been machine translated. Cloud Software Group will not be held responsible for any damage or issues that may arise from using machine-translated content.

Service mesh

October 27, 2023

Contributed by:

C S

October 27, 2023

Contributed by:

C S

Service mesh

Service mesh lite

Service mesh (Citrix ADC integration with Istio)

In this article