The microservice architecture involves breaking the application into small interconnected services, each performing a specific task. This breakdown enables developers to work on individual services without affecting the rest of the application, leading to more agility and easier scaling. These services communicate through APIs and, as the number of services within an application increases, developers may introduce a microservice service mesh to control all the service-to-service communication.

Many organizations build applications using microservices that often communicate with other distributed services. Ensuring that they remain secure requires a “secure token service,” secure communication protocols (mTLS), authentication, authorization, and data encryption.

We are thrilled to announce native support of Kong Mesh, Istio and Kuma within Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), enabling users to combine stellar service mesh solutions with the only authorization management platform that supports trusted cloud architecture. Styra DAS allows teams to manage policies across a broad spectrum of systems, like Kubernetes, microservices, public cloud, and more.

Cloud native tooling for authorization is an emerging trend poised to revolutionize how we approach this oft-neglected part of our applications. Open Policy Agent (OPA) is the leading contender to become a de-facto standard for applying policies to many different systems — from workloads running on Kubernetes to requests passing through Istio.

Service mesh technology emerged with the popularization of microservice architectures. Because service mesh facilitates the separation of networking from the business logic, it enables you to focus on your application’s core competency. Microservice applications are distributed over multiple servers, data centers, or continents, making them highly network dependent.