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AWS App Mesh vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?
Key Differences Between AWS App Mesh and Kubernetes
Introduction
Below are the key differences between AWS App Mesh and Kubernetes.
Service Architecture: AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides control over communication between services within an application, allowing for observability, traffic management, and security. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is a container orchestration platform that manages the deployment, scaling, and operations of containers in a cluster.
Platform Support: AWS App Mesh is a platform-agnostic service mesh and can work with any container orchestration platform, including Kubernetes. It allows users to connect and manage services across different platforms seamlessly. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is a specific platform for container orchestration and does not directly support other platforms.
Traffic Routing: AWS App Mesh offers advanced traffic routing capabilities, such as weighted routing, circuit breaking, and retries. It allows fine-grained control over how traffic is routed between services within an application. In Kubernetes, traffic routing is primarily handled through its built-in load balancing and service discovery mechanisms, which may not provide the same level of flexibility and control as AWS App Mesh.
Observability: AWS App Mesh provides built-in observability features like metrics, logs, and distributed tracing, which give developers insights into the behavior and performance of their applications. Kubernetes, on the other hand, does not offer these features out of the box. Observability in Kubernetes requires additional tools and configurations.
Security and Authorization: AWS App Mesh offers features like encryption, certificate management, and mutual TLS authentication to secure communication between services. It also supports fine-grained access control policies using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. While Kubernetes provides some security features, such as authentication and authorization, it may require additional configuration to achieve the same level of security as AWS App Mesh.
Scalability and Autoscaling: AWS App Mesh offers automatic scaling of services based on custom metrics and thresholds. It can automatically scale services up or down based on demand. Kubernetes also supports autoscaling, but its capabilities may not be as advanced as those provided by AWS App Mesh.
In Summary, AWS App Mesh and Kubernetes differ in their service architecture, platform support, traffic routing capabilities, observability features, security and authorization mechanisms, and scalability/autoscaling capabilities.
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.
Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
Pros of AWS App Mesh
Pros of Kubernetes
- Leading docker container management solution164
- Simple and powerful128
- Open source106
- Backed by google76
- The right abstractions58
- Scale services25
- Replication controller20
- Permission managment11
- Supports autoscaling9
- Cheap8
- Simple8
- Self-healing6
- No cloud platform lock-in5
- Promotes modern/good infrascture practice5
- Open, powerful, stable5
- Reliable5
- Scalable4
- Quick cloud setup4
- Cloud Agnostic3
- Captain of Container Ship3
- A self healing environment with rich metadata3
- Runs on azure3
- Backed by Red Hat3
- Custom and extensibility3
- Sfg2
- Gke2
- Everything of CaaS2
- Golang2
- Easy setup2
- Expandable2
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Cons of AWS App Mesh
Cons of Kubernetes
- Steep learning curve16
- Poor workflow for development15
- Orchestrates only infrastructure8
- High resource requirements for on-prem clusters4
- Too heavy for simple systems2
- Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)1
- More moving parts to secure1
- Additional Technology Overhead1