> You could use OpenZiti together with Cilium/Calico, there are some distros, eg.,
https://kubezt.com/ which do that (though in truth, KubeZT has moved to Istio for E-W, uses OpenZiti for N-S. OpenZiti does a lot of things that service mesh technologies do not, for example, extending outside of the cluster (incl. to non-K8S workloads), allowing closing of inbound FW ports, providing a private DNS outside of cluster, removing the need for VPNs, L4 loadbalancers, MPLS, SDWAN, public DNS etc.
Yeah Istio is a hard no for me... And yeah I definitely appreciate that OpenZiti does a lot more than service meshes do! I personally try to avoid service meshes (if I were to use one, I'd go with linkerd).
I'm just not convinced that many people need a service mesh -- I haven't really needed one yet, but maybe I'm just not at the right scale/etc.
> Oh, I should note too, while we have a bunch of ways to deploy OpenZiti on K8S today, we are in the process of building/releasing an admission controller and an ingress controller for OpenZiti.
This is awesome -- I really like my current admission controller though (Traefik), it's FANTASTIC. I think moving ingress controllers might be a large lift for people (it would be for me).
> Whats the project you work on?
I don't really work on it actively these days (haven't in a while) but https://nimbusws.com
Looking forward to picking it back up more actively in the future though, for now I use it for some small background services.