Microsoft Corp. today broadened its open-source efforts with the launch of Service Mesh Interface, or SMI, a specification that aims to bring interoperability to a key part of the cloud technology landscape.

The service mesh is a concept that emerged with the rise of software containers. Companies are increasingly taking a modular approach with their software projects, breaking up applications into loosely connected components packaged into containers. These modules are highly portable and can be easier to maintain than traditional software, but they also make networking more complicated, which is what service mesh technology addresses.

The basic idea is to implement the low-level mechanisms that coordinate the flow of packets as a centralized software layer. A service mesh takes on the burden of network orchestration, removing the need for developers to built complex traffic management features into their applications. Microsoft’s new SMI specification aims to make it easier to use the open-source tools that engineers most commonly pick to implement service meshes.

The project provides a set of common application programming interfaces for Istio, the most popular tool in the category, along with alternatives such as Linkerd, Consul and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s App Mesh. These APIs act as a kind of unified abstraction layer. An application built on top of SMI can interchangeably use all the service mesh tools the specification supports without requiring major code changes.

Microsoft hopes that the technology will help boost enterprise adoption of service mesh architectures. Since SMI enables interoperability, it removes the need for companies to build their software on top of one specific service mesh tool and thus allows them to avoid the risk of getting locked into a single technology.

Microsoft has recruited a dozen other industry players  to support the development of SMI. They include Red Hat Inc., Docker Inc., VMware Inc., Pivotal Software Inc. and Canonical Ltd. as well as a number of startups.

SMI made its debut this morning at the Linux Foundation’s biannual Kubecon conference. The event is dedicated to Kubernetes, the go-to framework for managing containerized applications and the foundation on which most service mesh implementations are built. The technology is also the focus of two smaller software releases that Microsoft announced at Kubecon together with SMI.

The company has updated the Kubernetes extension for Visual Studio, its popular code editor, with an API that allows developers to add integrations with external solutions. Microsoft also debuted a new version of its open-source Helm tool for deploying Kubernetes applications. The software has been rewritten to make it more efficient and includes a revamped set of programming commands meant to ease day-to-day use.

Image: Pexels