According to the 2022 Service Mesh Adoption Survey, conducted by Solo.io and ClearPath Strategies, 85% of companies are modernizing their applications to a microservices architecture. These companies also report that microservices drive faster development cycles, as 56% of organizations with at least half of their applications on a microservices architecture have daily or more frequent release cycles. However, the uptick in microservices and increased development velocity have led to pain for many organizations as they struggle with microservices and API sprawl as well as added technical debt.

Also, more than 70% of organizations report having delayed or slowed down application deployment into production due to application networking or security concerns.

As microservices become a modern enterprise “must,” service mesh and API gateways have become viable solutions to address the headaches of managing application reliability, security, and observability. An overwhelming 87% of companies report using or evaluating a service mesh for use. The shift to service mesh technology can be attributed to the broad deployment of container-based architectures and explosion of microservices, which come as a result of companies looking for ways to expedite their digital transformation and move to a cloud-first posture or fully cloud-native development.

Service mesh, which controls service-to-service communication over a network, offers a solution for managing application reliability, security, and observability along with application traffic monitoring and management. The vast majority of respondents (89%) reported a very positive impact on application reliability as a result of using service mesh, including 44% who called the impact “transformative.”

While service mesh is still considered a new technology, nearly half of all companies (49%) reported using service mesh at some level. And adoption is greater among companies with a high degree of containerized architectures and Kubernetes usage. Among organizations with more than half of their production workloads running on Kubernetes, 81% use a service mesh, compared to only 45% of those organizations with half or less of their production workloads on Kubernetes.