Containous announces Maesh, a new open source service mesh aimed at making service-to-service communications simpler for developers building modern, cloud-native applications. Built on top of Traefik, the popular cloud-native edge router used by the world's largest web companies, Maesh is designed from the ground up to be lightweight, easy to use, and full featured - helping developers connect, secure and monitor traffic to and from their microservices-based applications.

Microservices, and its multiple organizational benefits, have become the defacto approach to building applications in the enterprise. However, as network communications in these dynamic environments get increasingly complex, service meshes are becoming a critical part of every microservice deployment. With service meshes, developers and operations teams have the ability to manage inter-service communication within a single management layer.

Maesh facilitates the adoption of microservices and improves the service mesh experience for developers by offering an easy sway to connect, secure and monitor the network traffic in any Kubernetes environment. Maesh eliminates communication complexity by monitoring and tracing application communications within Kubernetes clusters. Developers are able to optimize internal traffic, visualize traffic patterns, and secure communication channels, all while improving application performance.

Unlike other service mesh technologies - and based upon Traefik's original design principles of simplicity - Maesh can be installed and up and running within minutes. Developers can drastically reduce the time needed to connect and monitor their services and can instead focus on implementing business logic within their applications. And while many service meshes take an invasive "all or nothing" approach to adoption, Maesh is designed to be completely non-invasive, allowing development teams across the organization to incrementally "opt-in" applications progressively over time.

Backed by Traefik's rich feature-set, Maesh enables critical features across any Kubernetes environment: Observability (OpenTracing, Metrics), Multi-Protocol Support (HTTP layer and TCP layer), Traffic Management (load balancing, retries & fail-overs, circuit breakers & rate limits), and Security and Safety (access controls). Maesh is also Service Mesh Interface (SMI) compliant, a standard specification for service mesh interoperability in Kubernetes.

"With Maesh, Containous continues to innovate with the mission to drastically simplify cloud-native adoption for all enterprises," said Emile Vauge, CEO, Containous. "We've been proud of how popular Traefik has been for developers as a critical open source solution, and we're excited to now bring them Maesh."