Customers and SAs often have questions about how to deploy OpenShift Service Mesh for their particular cluster or application needs. One of the unique features of OSSM (Compared to upstream Istio) is its multi-tenancy setup on OpenShift clusters. In the meantime, the Istio community is hard at work on mesh configurations for multiple clusters.

In the upstream, this document describes different ways of deploying and managing Istio clusters. Not all patterns are supported by OSSM, but with 2.1 and the support for Service Mesh Federation more will be. We should look to write a guide similar to the following, but for OpenShift clusters, terminology and personas:

https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/deployment/deployment-models/

Some of the patterns could include:

• Federated Service Meshes (2.1)
• Service Meshes with External Services (2.1)