NGINX Service Mesh

Why Use NGINX Service Mesh?

Data Plane Matters

NGINX Service Mesh (NSM) is uniquely designed around the idea that the “data plane matters”. Leveraging the power of NGINX Plus to operate highly available and scalable containerized environments, we bring a level of traffic management intelligence to the market that no other reverse proxy sidecars can offer. Through building a control plane from scratch, solely focused on the NGINX Plus data plane, NSM delivers a highly optimized service mesh designed for high‑volume and secure container traffic management.

Other service meshes rely on tools from external vendors to provide critical service‑mesh features, or provide just bare‑bones sidecar proxies designed to move packets from one side of a virtual interface to another. NSM is the only mesh designed around a fully integrated data plane, using a custom‑built control plane for this purpose. It’s the only mesh to fully integrate ingress and egress traffic management at the edge within sidecar policies, with one single configuration. Lightweight and focused on Layer 7 application traffic management within clusters, NSM is non‑intrusive, allowing the rest of your tech stack to perform without complications, the way it should be.

Flexible Traffic Handling and Portability

NGINX Service Mesh is platform‑agnostic and offers flexible traffic management. When deploying a new version of an application, you might want to limit the amount of traffic it receives at first, in case there is a bug. With our intelligent container traffic management, you can specify policies that limit traffic to new services and slowly increase it over time. Features like rate limiting and circuit breakers give you full control over the traffic flowing through your services. You can leverage a robust range of traffic distribution models, including:

Rate shaping, quality of service (QoS), service throttling
Blue-green deployments
Canary releases
Circuit breaker pattern
A/B testing
API gateway features

Authentication and Security at the Point of Service

Security is more critical now than ever. Data breaches can cost organizations millions of dollars every year in lost revenue and reputation. NGINX Service Mesh ensures all communication is mTLS‑encrypted so that there is no sensitive data on the wire for hackers to steal. Access controls enable you to define policies about which services can talk to each other. NSM supports:

Service identity
Zero trust
mTLS enforcement
Certificate lifecycle management
Configuration gating and governance
Default block for ingress and egress north‑south traffic (requires NGINX Ingress Controller)
Allowlist support for ingress and egress
Edge firewalling with NGINX App Protect (requires NGINX Ingress Controller)
Per‑service access control for east‑west traffic