The always-free NGINX Service Mesh scales from open source projects to a fully supported, secure, and scalable enterprise‑grade solution.
Lightweight, Turnkey, and Developer-Friendly
Take control of Kubernetes with NGINX Service Mesh, featuring a unified data plane for ingress and egress management in a single configuration.
Why Use NGINX Service Mesh?
Data Plane Matters
The real star of NGINX Service Mesh is the fully integrated, high-performance data plane. Leveraging the power of NGINX Plus to operate highly available and scalable containerized environments, our data plane brings a level of enterprise traffic management, performance, and scalability to the market that no other sidecars can offer. It provides the seamless and transparent load balancing, reverse proxy, traffic routing, identity, and encryption features needed for production-grade service mesh deployments. When paired with the NGINX Plus-based version of NGINX Ingress Controller, it provides a unified data plane that can be managed with a single configuration.
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
Inside a service mesh, services talk to each other constantly, and every one of those hops is a chance to leak data or let an attacker move laterally. NGINX Service Mesh closes that gap by encrypting all service-to-service communication with mTLS, so there is no sensitive data on the wire for an attacker to read. Access controls enable you to define policies about which services can talk to each other. NGINX Service Mesh 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
Deploy on Any Kubernetes Platform, Including:
- Red Hat OpenShift
- Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- IBM Private Cloud
- Diamanti