It’s one thing to build complex software applications for containers’ bundled technology programs. It’s another to get them to talk to each other. The complexities surrounding the Kubernetes container orchestration management system can be a challenge for even the most experienced developer. This is why the service mesh, a layer for managing communication and monitoring traffic across Kubernetes clusters, is emerging as an important new tool in providing enterprise stability and reliability.

“It’s this single point of integration that removes a lot of really hard computer science problems from ordinary application development. That’s a wonderful thing,” said Ben Sigelman (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of LightStep Inc.

Sigelman visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu). They discussed an important service mesh project underway at Lyft Inc. and the renaissance taking place inside the software community to let developers focus on key tasks. (* Disclosure below.)

Lyft’s Envoy offers network transparency

An important step for the service mesh came earlier this year, when the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced a new project involving Lyft’s Envoy. The sidecar proxy tool used by the ride-sharing company (who is also a LightStep customer) allows engineers to see failures and offers more transparency into the network layer to enable faster action.

“To see Envoy deployed at their company is really instructive,” Sigelman said. “If you need a change that’s going to cut across your entire system, it is not feasible to wait for people to redeploy. … There are going to be services that are not going to be maintained by human beings anymore, and no one’s about to volunteer for that chore.”

LightStep’s role in providing advanced new tools that can deliver insights surrounding highly complex production software is part of a renaissance taking shape within the tech community. New software tools are coming into the market to remove services that developers don’t want to worry about, so they can focus more on their craft.

“A lot of the changes that we’re seeing allow people to operate more independently, and that’s what motivated the transition to microservices in the first place,” Sigelman said. “It wasn’t just to rewrite everyone’s software for fun.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE