It is no secret that although microservice environments enable portability, allow faster and more frequent deployment cycles, and can even enable organizations to create teams with more specialized areas of concern, they also come with increased needs around solutions for traffic management, security, and observability. The service mesh pattern for these needs is implemented numerous ways across the ecosystem, and Microsoft has been active in the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) community, helping define the specification for a standard set of portable APIs for common service mesh functionality across service mesh implementations. Vendors can implement SMI to ensure that ecosystem tools can work on many meshes while allowing customer choice of mesh provider.

Today we are excited to introduce a new open source project, Open Service Mesh (OSM), which is a lightweight and extensible service mesh that runs on Kubernetes. OSM enables users to uniformly manage, secure, and observe service-to-service communication in highly dynamic microservice environments. We hope for OSM to be a community-led project that it will spur collaboration on new and existing APIs for SMI. We intend for OSM to have open governance and be in a place where we can easily collaborate with the community, so we have already submitted a proposal starting the process of donating OSM to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).