Software developers often need to build solutions that can allow organizations to manage thousands of Kubernetes containers. Microservices Kubernetes architectures, often made of a variety of independent services, can benefit from using a service mesh, or platform, to coordinate communication and security between these many independent services.

In our data center, we conducted hands-on testing on the benefits of using VMware Tanzu Service Mesh (TSM). We first deployed a microservices application, distributed over two Kubernetes clusters, with secure inter-cluster communications for the services. We did this twice, once using TSM and once using only Istio. We found that using VMware Tanzu Service Mesh to deploy our microservices service mesh environment required much less time and many fewer steps than using the native Istio distribution.

We also tested two performance-optimization strategies: a TLS optimization scheme that uses features provided by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and a new TCP bypass scheme. We found the Intel multi-buffer cryptography optimization for Intel 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable processors reduced request duration by up to 47.1 percent, and the TCP bypass optimization reduced request duration by as much as 11.4 percent.

Find out more about the benefits of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and our testing in the linked report.