servicemeshinterface/smi-spec

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: archived

Adoption not part of the score

1059 stars · 129 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Service Mesh Interface (SMI) is a CNCF specification defining a standard, provider-agnostic set of Kubernetes CRD-based APIs for service mesh capabilities such as traffic access control, traffic metrics, traffic specs, and traffic splitting. The project was archived by CNCF in October 2023, with its focus shifted toward the Gateway API GAMMA initiative.

Use cases

• standardize service mesh APIs across Kubernetes clusters
• split traffic between services for canary deployments
• define traffic access control policies for mesh services
• capture inter-service metrics like error rate and latency
• build mesh-agnostic applications not tied to a specific service mesh implementation

When to choose

• you need a portable, provider-agnostic service mesh API on Kubernetes
• you maintain tooling that must support multiple service meshes (Istio, Linkerd, Consul, Traefik Mesh)
• you want a simple spec for traffic splitting and access control

When to avoid

• starting a new project - the spec is archived and no longer maintained
• you need actively developed service mesh standards - consider Kubernetes Gateway API / GAMMA instead
• you need a runnable service mesh rather than a specification

Facets

service · maturity abandoned

microservices api-gateway monitoring configuration-management microservices cloud-computing networking cloud self-hosted service-mesh specification cncf crds traffic-management archived-project traffic-split traffic-policy containers devops kubernetes

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