In this Catalyst, China Mobile explores Service Mesh architecture and Kubernetes Operator to optimize operation and maintenance control of business applications.

The project aims to accelerate the development and delivery of business applications, improve application reliability through architecture optimization, improve microservice availability and evolve open Application Programming Interface (API) capability sharing between the service level and business sharing level. Broadly, the objectives are to improve operations and service quality and reduce the cost of distributed transformation.

The Catalyst addresses multiple challenges in the cloud-native transformation of business applications:

• Heterogeneous systems cannot be governed in a unified way. There are multiple protocols and frameworks, complex infrastructure and the coexistence of virtual machines (VMs) and containers. It is difficult to manage old and new systems together as well as systems from different manufacturers.
• There is effectively no observability across systems and the service management level of different systems accessing the API gateway is low, which makes it difficult to control service quality.

By establishing a Service Mesh framework, business applications can be automatically observed and controlled so that China Mobile can review the quality of all services end-to-end. Service Mesh architecture is expected to enable China Mobile to coordinate capabilities in complex scenarios across its Group headquarters and local operating companies, while also establishing open operations between China Mobile companies and external users, such as Internet companies.