As microservice deployments grow, managing traffic routing, failure isolation, and end-to-end visibility in application code becomes increasingly complex. Service Mesh (ASM) moves these concerns to a dedicated infrastructure layer—giving you traffic management, observability, security, fault recovery, and support for microservices architectures across your Container Compute Service (ACS) cluster without modifying application code.
How ASM works
ASM manages all components of the Istio control plane, so you can focus on application development and deployment. Compatible with open source Istio, ASM lets you use declarative configuration to define flexible routing rules, enforce security policies, and observe service behavior across the mesh.
A single ASM instance can manage services across multiple Kubernetes clusters, providing centralized traffic control, service discovery, high availability, and load balancing.
Key features
For the full feature list, see Features.
Feature | Description | Learn more |
Full lifecycle management of mesh instances | Fully managed control plane compatible with Istio community specifications. Supports one-click deployment, upgrade, and deletion, reducing operational overhead. | |
Support for multiple cluster types | Manage applications across ACK, ACK Serverless, ACS, edge, and externally registered Kubernetes clusters from a single ASM instance. | |
Unified ingress and egress gateways | Single entry and exit points for mesh traffic. Enable or disable mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) with one click for end-to-end encrypted communication. | |
Multiple types of traffic management | Multi-protocol traffic management including end-to-end canary releases, circuit breaking, local rate limiting, slow start warm-up, traffic fallback, and fault recovery. | |
Observability | Mesh diagnostics integrated with managed tracing, monitoring, and logging services for end-to-end visibility. | |
Non-intrusive zero trust security | Out-of-the-box zero trust security with dynamic configuration. Covers identity authentication, security certificates, policy enforcement, and visual analytics. | |
Extensibility for custom logic | A plug-in marketplace with ready-to-use extension plug-ins. Also supports custom EnvoyFilter configurations. | |
Ecosystem integration | Compatible with GitOps toolchains and serverless or AI services such as Knative and KServe. |
Next steps
To connect your ACS cluster to ASM and start managing services, see Getting started.