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AWS App Mesh vs Azure Service Fabric: What are the differences?
Key Differences between AWS App Mesh and Azure Service Fabric
AWS App Mesh and Azure Service Fabric are two popular platforms used for building and managing modern applications. While both platforms offer similar functionality, there are some key differences between them.
Deployment Model: AWS App Mesh is a fully managed service that handles application networking, while Azure Service Fabric provides a platform for building and deploying microservices-based applications. App Mesh focuses on abstracting the networking layer, while Service Fabric is a more comprehensive platform for managing the entire lifecycle of applications.
Service Discovery: In AWS App Mesh, service discovery is handled by a service registry such as AWS Cloud Map or Amazon Route 53. On the other hand, Azure Service Fabric has built-in service discovery capabilities, allowing services to discover and communicate with each other without the need for external service registries.
Integration with Container Orchestration: AWS App Mesh integrates seamlessly with popular container orchestration platforms like Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate. It provides native support for service meshes in a containerized environment. Azure Service Fabric also supports container orchestration but focuses more on its own container orchestrator, Azure Container Instances.
Language Support: Both platforms support a wide range of programming languages, but Azure Service Fabric has a broader selection with support for languages such as C++, C#, Java, Node.js, and Python. AWS App Mesh primarily focuses on microservices and containerized applications and provides language-independent support.
Managed vs. Self-managed: AWS App Mesh is a fully managed service, meaning AWS takes care of scaling, updates, and maintenance. In contrast, Azure Service Fabric provides options for both a managed service and a self-managed service. Users can choose to deploy and manage Service Fabric clusters themselves or leverage Azure's managed Service Fabric offering.
Pricing Model: The pricing models for AWS App Mesh and Azure Service Fabric differ as well. App Mesh pricing is based on the number of requests made to the service and any additional data transfer costs. On the other hand, Azure Service Fabric pricing is based on the number and size of virtual machines used for running the Service Fabric clusters.
In summary, AWS App Mesh and Azure Service Fabric differ in their deployment models, service discovery approaches, integration with container orchestration platforms, language support, management options, and pricing models. These differences should be taken into consideration when choosing the platform that best fits the requirements of your application.
One of our applications is currently migrating to AWS, and we need to make a decision between using AWS API Gateway with AWS App Mesh, or Kong API Gateway with Kuma.
Some people advise us to benefit from AWS managed services, while others raise the vendor lock issue. So, I need your advice on that, and if there is any other important factor rather than vendor locking that I must take into consideration.
The benefit of using Kuma + Kong Gateway are:
- Feature-set: Kong + Kuma provide an end-to-end solution for both APIM and Service Mesh with a feature-set, and a performance, that is not matched by AWS services. In addition to this you can extend Kong Gateway with 70+ plugins out of the box and choose between 500+ plugins from the community to cover every use-case. In comparison, the feature-set of AWS API Gateway is quite limited and basic.
- Performance: Especially in the case of Kong Gateway, performance has always been a top priority for the project (more performance deliver more reliable applications). In some benchmarks the latency added by AWS API Gateway can be 200x more than what you would achieve with Kong Gateway natively which has been hand-crafted for maximum throughput.
- Cost: While cloud vendors like AWS make it very easy to get up and running with their services at a lower initial cost, that cost ramps up very quickly (exponentially) as the number of requests are increasing. With Kong GW you don't have this problem, since you can run tens of thousands of concurrent requests on a small EC2 instance (or Kubernetes Ingress, via the native K8s ingress controller for Kong Gateway).
- Portability: You can replicate your infrastructure on any other cloud, or on your development machines with ease. Want to run your gateway + mesh on your local Kubernetes cluster? You can do that. Want to run your infrastructure on another cloud provider? You can do that. Strategically you have full ownership of your infrastructure and its future. When it comes to Kuma, you can also run a Mesh on VM-based workloads in addition to Kubernetes (Kuma is universal).
- And much more.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO of Kong.
AWS App Mesh is useful when your micro services are deployed across Ec2 , EKS or ECS. Assume you are in process of migrating microservices from ec2 instances to ecs, its easy to switch using Virtual router configuration. As App Mesh is managed service and easy to bring up ,its worth giving it a try for your use case before choosing Kuma or any other tool.
Pros of AWS App Mesh
Pros of Azure Service Fabric
- Intelligent, fast, reliable5
- Runs most of Azure core services4
- Reliability3
- Superior programming models3
- More reliable than Kubernetes3
- Open source3
- Quickest recovery and healing in the world2
- Deploy anywhere1
- Is data storage technology1
- Battle hardened in Azure > 10 Years1