Service Mesh Interface(SMI) for Non-Traditional Service Mesh Implementations – is this a possible match?

Service Mesh is a hot topic, with competing implementations such as Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect. The open source project Service Mesh Interface (SMI) was born with broad industry support (Microsoft, Linkerd, HashiCorp, Solo.io, VMware, Aspen Mesh, and Red Hat to name a few), to provide a common API that avoids vendor locking, enable inter-operability, and support innovation. However, in parallel, to address gaps with respect to handling complicated L2 and L3 use cases, the Network Service Mesh effort was launched. Can SMI work with Network Service Mesh to provide fine grain network control at the lower layers to meet demanding low-latency/ high-throughput use cases? This session will cover traditional service mesh implementations, the SMI interface, NSM, and our efforts to integrate NSM with SMI, to provide the visibility and control across the networking stack to meet next-Gen use cases.