emerging · 0.2 capability schema

Service Mesh

Score 23.1 / 100 32 providers +7 via APIs 27 APIs Search apis.io →

Providers using this tag (31)

Ranked by API Evangelist rating — Exemplar and Strong are expanded by default.

Exemplar 1 Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
KongKongAPI GatewayAI GatewayAI Connectivity2 APIs73.2
Strong 4 Solid coverage with minor gaps
CalicoCNIContainerseBPFKubernetes1 API66.3Solo.ioCompanyAPI GatewayKubernetes5 APIs63.0GlooAPI GatewayCloud-NativeDeveloper PortalEnvoy8 APIs57.8AWS App MeshDeprecatedEnvoyMicroservicesNetworking1 API55.1
Developing 8 Usable, with meaningful gaps to close
BuoyantAI ObservabilityKubernetesLinkerdmTLS3 APIs54.0Amazon VPC LatticeMicroservicesService Networking73 APIs50.3Gloo MeshIstioKubernetesMulti-ClusterOpen Source2 APIs47.3EnvoyEnvoyCloud-NativeLoad BalancingProxy3 APIs44.0Apache DubboApacheGoJavaMicroservices1 API42.9Envoy GatewayAPI GatewayCNCFEnvoyKubernetes3 APIs42.4KumaEnvoyKubernetesMicroservicesSecurity1 API42.0IsovalentCompanyNetworkingKuberneteseBPF2 APIs41.1
Thin 12 Limited public surface area
TetrateEnterpriseEnvoyIstioKubernetes1 API39.2Google Cloud Service MeshGoogle CloudIstioKubernetesMicroservices13 APIs38.5HashiCorp ConsulACLConfigurationHealth CheckingKey-Value Store1 API37.0LinkerdKubernetesmTLSObservabilitySecurity3 APIs37.0Google AnthosContainer PlatformHybrid CloudKubernetesMulti-Cloud1 API36.9IstioIstioCNCFKubernetesMicroservices3 APIs36.4APIClarityAPI ObservabilityAPI SecurityAPI Traffic AnalysisCisco12 APIs35.9Ambient MeshIstioKubernetesZero Trust1 API35.2Consul ConnectConsulEnvoyHashiCorpIntentions1 API35.0VMware TanzuCloud-NativeContainersEnterpriseKubernetes2 APIs35.0Traefik MeshKubernetesOpen SourceSMI1 API28.6MesheryCloud-NativeCNCFKubernetes28.4
Emerging 4 Early or largely undocumented
Open Service MeshCloud-NativeEnvoyKubernetesMicroservices1 API22.9GreymatterEnterpriseKubernetesNetworking3 APIs18.0MOSNProxyAPI GatewayCloud-Native1 API17.1MerbridgeCNCFeBPFNetworkingPerformance1 API16.6
Minimal 2 Almost no public developer surface
NGINX Service MeshContainer NetworkingEnd of SaleF5Kubernetes1 API10.3OctarineCompanySecurityKubernetesCloud-Native2.5

APIs with this tag (27)

Ranked by the provider's API Evangelist rating — the Kin Score is scored per provider, not per API, so every API of a provider shares its band. How the rating works →

Exemplar 1 Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
Kong MeshKong Mesh is an enterprise-grade service mesh built on Kuma and Envoy, providing universal service mesh cap...73.2
Strong 2 Solid coverage with minor gaps
Amazon ECS Service Connect APIAmazon ECS Service Connect provides management of service-to-service communication as Amazon ECS configurat...58.4Traefik MeshLightweight service mesh built on Traefik Proxy. Offers traffic management and observability for service-to...57.0
Developing 6 Usable, with meaningful gaps to close
Buoyant CloudBuoyant Cloud is the hosted control surface for Linkerd fleets — health checks, golden metrics, multi-clust...54.0Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd (BEL)Buoyant Enterprise Linkerd is the enterprise-supported distribution of Linkerd with additional features inc...54.0Linkerd Service MeshLinkerd is a CNCF-graduated service mesh for Kubernetes that transparently adds mutual TLS encryption, late...54.0Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh APIRed Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, based on Istio, Kiali, Jaeger, and Prometheus, provides traffic management,...49.5Gloo Mesh CoreGloo Mesh Core extended a single Istio service mesh with insights, operational tooling and lifecycle manage...47.3Gloo Mesh EnterpriseGloo Mesh Enterprise (documented as "Gloo Mesh (Gloo Platform APIs)", current version 2.14, released 2026-0...47.3
Thin 13 Limited public surface area
Tetrate Service Bridge Platform APIThe Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) Platform API provides programmatic management of the TSB control plane, in...39.2Tetrate Service Bridge Security APIThe TSB Security API provides configuration resources for enforcing security policies in a Tetrate Service ...39.2Tetrate Service Bridge Traffic APIThe TSB Traffic API provides configuration resources for managing service-to-service traffic within a Tetra...39.2Google Cloud Network Security APIThe Network Security API manages security policies for Cloud Service Mesh, including authorization policies...38.5Google Cloud Service Mesh xDS Control Plane APICloud Service Mesh uses the open-source xDS v3 control plane API to distribute configuration to Envoy sidec...38.5Envoy Proxy Rate Limit Service APIThe Envoy Rate Limit Service (RLS) is a gRPC-based API that allows Envoy to delegate rate limiting decision...37.2Istio Mesh Config APIThe Istio Mesh Config API (istio.mesh.v1alpha1) provides global configuration for the Istio service mesh co...36.4Istio Operator APIThe Istio Operator API (istio.operator.v1alpha1) defines the IstioOperator custom resource used to install,...36.4Istio Telemetry APIThe Istio Telemetry API (telemetry.istio.io) provides configuration resources for managing observability wi...36.4Ambient MeshAmbient Mesh provides a sidecar-less service mesh via the Kubernetes Gateway API and Istio ambient mode. It...35.2A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector (TKC)The Thunder Kubernetes Connector (TKC) runs inside Kubernetes and configures upstream Thunder ADC objects a...31.4HCP Consul APIThe HCP Consul API enables management of HCP Consul clusters, including provisioning, scaling, and federati...30.0HashiCorp ConsulConsul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between se...27.5
Emerging 5 Early or largely undocumented
Open Service MeshService mesh control plane for Kubernetes that implements the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification, p...22.9Greymatter Platform APIThe Greymatter Platform API provides programmatic access to configure and manage the Greymatter zero trust ...18.0Greymatter Service Connectivity APIThe Greymatter Service Connectivity layer provides APIs for connecting services across all environments inc...18.0MOSNMOSN is a cloud-native network proxy that supports multiple protocols (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, gRPC), dynamic rou...17.1MerbridgeMerbridge uses eBPF to accelerate service mesh data planes by replacing iptables-based traffic interception...16.6

Companies reaching this through an API (7)

These companies publish an API, specification or operation carrying “Service Mesh” but do not classify their business under it. Listed unranked and kept out of the count above, because one tagged operation is not a statement about what a company does.

A10 Networks Amazon ECS Envoy Proxy HashiCorp HashiCorp Cloud Platform Red Hat OpenShift Traefik Labs

Score breakdown

Frequency
47.7
log-scaled weighted occurrences
Breadth
0.8
spread across providers
Quality lift
46.6
mean composite of providers using it
Cohesion
11.0
strength of nearest seed neighbor

Related tags

Envoy 12 co-occurrences Istio 8 co-occurrences Traffic Management 9 co-occurrences mTLS 7 co-occurrences Multi-Cluster 5 co-occurrences Kubernetes 29 co-occurrences Cloud-Native 13 co-occurrences CNCF 6 co-occurrences

Where this tag comes from

Api tag27
Provider tag32

Cohort brief

Auto-generated

The 30 providers in the APIs.io catalog tagged Service Mesh, scored on the Kin Score. Every figure below is computed from the catalog — nothing here is written.

Providers
30
of 32 on the roster
Mean Kin Score
39.6
+16.7 vs catalog 22.9
Mean Agent Readiness
21.2
+9.3 vs catalog 11.9
Spread
10.3–73.2
median 37.8 · σ 14.6
How the 30 split by band
Exemplar 1Strong 4Developing 8Thin 12Emerging 4Minimal 1
Facet averages, against the whole catalog
FacetThis cohortCatalogDifferenceScored
Developer Ergonomics 44.8 23.2 +21.6 30
Contract Quality 37.7 17.6 +20.1 30
Operational Transparency 31.3 13.7 +17.6 30
Contract Governance 13.3 6.3 +7 30
Discoverability 64.9 58.1 +6.8 30
Access Clarity 31.9 26.5 +5.4 30

A facet is averaged over the members that carry it, not over the whole cohort — the “Scored” column is that count. Averaging an absent facet as zero would score our own coverage gaps as the providers’ posture.

What this cohort publishes
ArtifactThis cohortCatalogDifference
MCP server (any) 17% 14% +3
MCP server (first-party) 10% 12% -2
Agent Skills 0% 0% 0
OAuth scopes 10% 11% -1
Security 100% 98% +2
Arazzo workflows 0% 2% -2
Governance rules 50% 14% +36

mcp_pct counts any mcp/ artifact including ones API Evangelist derived from the provider OpenAPI; mcp_first_party_pct counts only servers the provider publishes. Prefer the latter.

Top by Kin Score
  1. 1 Kong 73.2
  2. 2 Calico 66.3
  3. 3 Solo.io 63
  4. 4 Gloo 57.8
  5. 5 AWS App Mesh 55.1
  6. 6 Buoyant 54
  7. 7 Amazon VPC Lattice 50.3
  8. 8 Gloo Mesh 47.3
  9. 9 Envoy 44
  10. 10 Apache Dubbo 42.9
Top by Agent Readiness
  1. 1 Kong 46.9
  2. 2 Solo.io 37.6
  3. 3 AWS App Mesh 37.1
  4. 4 Calico 36.2
  5. 5 Gloo 34.4
  6. 6 APIClarity 32.5
  7. 7 Envoy 27.3
  8. 8 Traefik Mesh 26.7
  9. 9 Google Cloud Service Mesh 26.5
  10. 10 Gloo Mesh 26.3
This roster declares 32 members; 31 resolve to a provider in the catalog and 30 carry a score (97%). The figures above describe the scored members only.Generated from the catalog build of 5 October 2026, across 29093 providers, using the same computation served by the APIs.io cohort API. Briefs are published for rosters of 5 or more scored providers; below that a distribution is not meaningful.

Work with this as data

Every tag here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

MCP server

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https://apis.io/mcp

Tools for tags

7 MCP tools reach this
  • find_tagsBrowse and filter every tag in the catalog.
  • get_cohortThis tag as a scored cohort — every provider carrying it, with scores.
  • cohort_statsPRO — the distribution across this tag: mean, median, band split, adoption rates.
  • cohort_rankingsPRO — the leaderboard, on composite AND agent-readiness axes.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This tag 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/tags/service-mesh"
All tags 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/tags?limit=25"
As a scored cohort 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/cohorts/tag/service-mesh"
The distribution (Pro) 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/cohorts/tag/service-mesh/stats" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $APIS_IO_KEY"

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