[1/4] Composition & Service Function Chaining in Network Service Meshes
This is part one of a series of posts on Application Composition within Network Service Meshes, otherwise known as Service Function Chaining, but at L7 ad not L3/L4.
In Network Service Meshes (NSM), it is a complex affair steering L7 requests and responses through the correct network of components. The current approach at the time of writing (November 27th 2019) is to accept requests on a proxy entity and couple that proxy to an application component through a data-plane. Ideally the model works in both private on-premises and cloud deployment models.
For the sake of building a mental image, this is a graph network that has both control-plane and data-plane attributes on nodes and vertexes.
In IP networking, IP packets are routed to their destination and return to their source, based on their destination IP header field and when policy requires it, we can use other fields like source IP, protocol and port numbers etc. In large networks (like the internet), it’s the destination field in the IP header. In both IPv4 and IPv6 there exists a means to steer packets through a network based on additional fields being present at the point of ingress to a network edge and Continue reading
