This topic describes the benefits of Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM).

Ease of use

  • You can create a service mesh instance with simple operations in the ASM console.
  • You can upgrade a service mesh instance with simple operations in the ASM console.
  • You can define virtual services, destination rules, and the ingress gateway resources of Istio.

Rich features

Feature Description
Fully managed
  • Allows you to install, deploy, and upgrade applications with simple operations.
  • Manages components of the control plane.
  • Allows you to focus on the development of business applications.
  • Is compatible with the specifications of the Istio community.
Traffic routing
  • Supports custom traffic routing rules.
  • Supports managing traffic between application services in multiple Kubernetes clusters.
  • Provides fine-grained traffic management.
  • Provides out-of-the-box fault recovery and adopts chaos engineering.
Security
  • Allows you to enable or disable mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) authentication for all services in a mesh.
  • Allows you to use mTLS authentication in different modes, such as the permissive mode and the strict mode.
  • Supports easy-to-use role-based access control (RBAC).
  • Allows you to connect third-party systems to it with simple operations.
Monitoring and diagnosis
  • Provides the mesh diagnosis feature.
  • Supports Tracing Analysis, Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS), and Log Service in a managed manner.
  • Provides end-to-end visibility.
  • Builds an ecosystem with multiple Alibaba Cloud services.
High stability
  • Builds a dedicated support team to guarantee the stability of managed services.
High availability
  • Provides various control plane specifications and service level agreements (SLAs) to meet different business requirements.
  • Supports multi-zone deployment.
Technical support
  • Manages the core components on the control plane to minimize O&M complexity.
  • Allows you to submit tickets for help.