Cloud-native networking company Containous SAS is open-sourcing a new service mesh that makes it easier for the separate parts of Kubernetes applications to communicate.

Containous is the company behind Traefik, a popular cloud-native edge router that automates traffic management over both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm container orchestration environments.

Maesh is its latest creation. It’s a service mesh that’s meant to help developers connect, secure and monitor traffic to and from their Kubernetes apps.

Service meshes are a dedicated infrastructure layer that control service-to-service communication over a network. They provide a method for the separate parts of an application, called microservices, to communicate with each other.

This is important because microservices are the building blocks, essentially the separate components, of modern, containerized applications that can run on any infrastructure platform. Kubernetes is an orchestration tool used to manage those applications at scale.

Maesh facilitates the adoption of microservices and improves the service mesh experience for developers by offering an easy way to connect, secure and monitor the network traffic within Kubernetes clusters, Containous said.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Maesh is that it can be installed and get up and running in a matter of minutes, the company said. This means developers don’t need to spend hours connecting and monitoring each microservice and can instead focus on the actual performance and capabilities of their apps.

Maesh is said to provide several capabilities, including observability through OpenTracing and other metrics, traffic management, multiprotocol support and security and safety through access controls. It’s also “Service Mesh Interface compliant,” which means it interoperates with other service meshes.

“With Maesh, Containous continues to innovate with the mission to drastically simplify cloud-native adoption for all enterprises,” said Emile Vauge, chief executive officer of Containous.

Images: Containous