---
description: >-
  Use policies to securely manage services across platforms and between private
  and public clouds.
---

# Service Mesh

## The Challenge

It's hard to improve performance and operations in a dynamic microservice environment.

## The Solution

### Dynamic Routing and Security

Grey Matter is a platform agnostic service mesh that simplifies network management. The mesh is made of [**Fabric, Data, and Sense**](../internals)--components that work in unison to optimize decentralized microservice performance on the network. Grey Matter's service policies and configurations enable **dynamic routing and security** based on service identity. These policies scale without IP-based rules or networking middleware.

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Grey Matter lets you dynamically change policies without touching any code.
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![](https://2512473607-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-LsNFVozLgvw3NDMzxBg%2F-LyUhFX4PmoS10QQsa_i%2F-LyUhrpMpM0MI73754Me%2Fmesh-abstract-4.png?alt=media\&token=aad92e62-74d0-4333-ace5-9496d4695f1a)

### Benefits of a Service Mesh

Grey Matter takes complexity from a single microservice and puts it into a "sidecar" proxy. This sidecar proxy works with its dedicated service to provide the following benefits:

* It gives its service behaviors the service needs to perform well in a microservice architecture, and
* It lets its dedicated service perform its business-specific tasks.

The following table summarizes the benefits a service mesh provides.

| Benefits                                          | Details                                                                                                       |
| ------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Inventory, Visibility, and Performance Management | Grey Matter's telemetry data shows how well a service is performing so you can adjust in real-time.           |
| Security Policy Management                        | Grey Matter manages policies based on service identities to provide secure service-to-service communications. |
| Traffic Management                                | Grey Matter manages traffic between services using route rules.                                               |

## Features

### Real-Time Performance Metrics

If you’re building microservices, you're anticipating the ability to scale, since a microservices architecture will look very different a year out. A new service introduces failure points, and microservices make it hard to find the root of failures without a mesh. A service mesh captures all communications as performance metrics. These metrics translate to more reliable service requests and a more secure way to scale.

### Secure and Reliable Decision-Making

Grey Matter **separates decision-making from data-gathering** with its data and control planes to improve the performance of each of these important activities.

The **data plane** is a collection of sidecar proxies: one proxy for each service. The data plane manages traffic from one application to another and includes routing, forwarding, load balancing, even authentication and authorization.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Note:** a service knows nothing about the network other than the way the network handles the proxy.
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The **control plane** connects data planes and serves as the policy and management layer of the service mesh. It collects telemetry data and makes decisions about configurations.

### Hybrid Cloud, Traffic Management, and Observability

Grey Matter lets you set policies you can enforce across cloud instantiations. Its single abstraction layer hides details of the underlying cloud.

**Service-to-service communication** can be managed centrally, enabling advanced traffic management patterns such as service failover, path-based routing, and traffic shifting that can be applied across public and private clouds, platforms, and networks.

**Centrally-managed service observability** includes detailed metrics on all service-to-service communication such as connections, bytes transferred, retries, timeouts, open circuits, and request rates, response codes.

### Secure Services Across Any Runtime Platform

Grey Matter offers secure communication between legacy and modern workloads. Sidecar proxies allow applications to be integrated without code changes and Layer 4 support provides nearly universal protocol compatibility.

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**Benefits of Using Grey Matter**

* Add business value instead of focusing on individual services.
* Recover faster during downtime.
* Find ways to optimize the mesh during runtime.
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### Certificate-Based Service Identity and Encrypted Communications

Grey Matter uses TLS certificates to identify services and secure communications. Using TLS provides a strong guarantee of the identity of services communicating, and ensures all data in transit is encrypted. These certificates use the SPIFFE format for interoperability with other platforms. Grey Matter can be a certificate authority to simplify deployment, or integrate with external signing authorities like Vault. All traffic between services is encrypted and authenticated with mutual TLS.

## Questions?

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[Contact us](mailto:info@greymatter.io) to learn more about Grey Matter's service mesh capabilities.
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