NGINX Service Mesh website screenshot

NGINX Service Mesh

NGINX Service Mesh (NSM) is a service mesh from F5 NGINX powered by NGINX Plus, designed to manage container-to-container traffic in Kubernetes environments. It provides mTLS, traffic policies via the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), traffic splitting, rate limiting, observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger), and integration with NGINX Plus Ingress Controller. NGINX Service Mesh exposes a control-plane REST API and a `nginx-meshctl` CLI for installation, sidecar injection, certificate management, and policy configuration. The upstream GitHub repository is archived; F5 announced End of Sale (EoS) for the NGINX Microservices Bundle as of July 1, 2023, and the project's successor for ingress and L7 routing is NGINX Gateway Fabric.

NGINX Service Mesh publishes 1 API on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Container Networking, End of Sale, F5, Kubernetes, and mTLS.

NGINX Service Mesh’s developer surface includes documentation, getting-started guide, GitHub presence, engineering blog, and 5 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub
23.0/100 emerging ▬ flat Agent 3/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-08-05 · rubric v0.9.1
AccessFreemium
1 APIs
Container NetworkingEnd of SaleF5KubernetesmTLSNGINXObservabilityService MeshSMITraffic Management

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-08-05 · rubric v0.9.1
Composite quality — 23.0/100 · emerging
Contract Quality 0.0 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 4.3 / 20
Commercial Clarity 7.9 / 20
Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13
Governance 0.0 / 12
Discoverability 5.9 / 10
Agent readiness — 3/100 · human only
Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3
A2A Agent Card 0 / 8
Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/nginx-service-mesh: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Want it done for you? Prioritized profiling — $2,500 →

APIs 1

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

NGINX Service Mesh Control Plane API

The NGINX Service Mesh control plane exposes a REST API used by the `nginx-meshctl` CLI to manage mesh configuration, sidecar injection, certificate authority operations, traffi...

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Nginx Service Mesh Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Nginx Service Mesh Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Nginx Service Mesh Finops

FINOPS

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Nginx Service Mesh Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · DMARC

SECURITY

Resources

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

GettingStarted
GettingStarted

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation
Documentation

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

LlmsText
LlmsText

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHub
GitHub

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity
DomainSecurity

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Website
Website
 Blog
Blog

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Architecture
Architecture
 Successor
Successor

Source (apis.yml)

apis.yml Raw ↑ 
aid: nginx-service-mesh
name: NGINX Service Mesh
description: NGINX Service Mesh (NSM) is a service mesh from F5 NGINX powered by NGINX Plus, designed to manage container-to-container
  traffic in Kubernetes environments. It provides mTLS, traffic policies via the Service Mesh Interface (SMI), traffic splitting,
  rate limiting, observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger), and integration with NGINX Plus Ingress Controller. NGINX Service
  Mesh exposes a control-plane REST API and a `nginx-meshctl` CLI for installation, sidecar injection, certificate management,
  and policy configuration. The upstream GitHub repository is archived; F5 announced End of Sale (EoS) for the NGINX Microservices
  Bundle as of July 1, 2023, and the project's successor for ingress and L7 routing is NGINX Gateway Fabric.
type: Index
accessModel:
  pricing: freemium
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Freemium
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - plans
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/nginx-service-mesh.png
tags:
- Container Networking
- End of Sale
- F5
- Kubernetes
- mTLS
- NGINX
- Observability
- Service Mesh
- SMI
- Traffic Management
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/nginx-service-mesh/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2026-04-28'
modified: '2026-04-28'
specificationVersion: '0.19'
apis:
- aid: nginx-service-mesh:control-plane-api
  name: NGINX Service Mesh Control Plane API
  description: The NGINX Service Mesh control plane exposes a REST API used by the `nginx-meshctl` CLI to manage mesh configuration,
    sidecar injection, certificate authority operations, traffic policies, and resource lookups. The API is internal to the
    cluster and is not published as a public OpenAPI document; its surface is documented through the API Usage guide and the
    `nginx-meshctl` reference.
  humanURL: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/reference/api-usage/
  tags:
  - API
  - Control Plane
  - Kubernetes
  - REST
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/reference/api-usage/
  - type: CLIReference
    url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/reference/nginx-meshctl/
  - type: GitHub
    url: https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-service-mesh
common:
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/nginx-service-mesh-domain-security.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/
- type: Documentation
  url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/get-started/
- type: Architecture
  url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-service-mesh/about/architecture/
- type: GitHub
  url: https://github.com/nginxinc/nginx-service-mesh
- type: Successor
  url: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-gateway-fabric/
- type: Blog
  url: https://www.f5.com/company/blog/nginx
- type: LlmsText
  url: https://docs.nginx.com/llms.txt
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com