A deep dive into the GigaOm Radar Report, Greymatter’s leadership, and where the service mesh market is headed.
Setting the Scene
Greymatter.io was recognized as a Leader and Outperformer in the 2025 GigaOm Radar for Service Mesh—our fourth consecutive year of top recognition, with the highest combined scores among 15 commercial vendors.
Service mesh has moved from “nice-to-have” to essential infrastructure for modern application delivery—but the real differentiator isn’t whether you have a mesh. It’s whether you can run securely, efficiently, and at scale across hybrid and multicloud environments.
In this discussion, Jon Collins (GigaOm) and Jim Gaspari (Greymatter.io) unpacked what GigaOm evaluates, why the market is evolving, and what IT leaders should prioritize now to stay ahead—especially across the three pillars that repeatedly define enterprise outcomes: Zero Trust, Observability, and Control Plane Architecture.
What the GigaOm Radar is (and How to Read it)
The GigaOm Radar is built to help teams choose the right solution for their scenario—not to crown a universal winner. It’s a decision tool. The value is in the framework—how you map capabilities to your real-world constraints (hybrid, compliance, team size, app maturity).
“It gives more or less suitable for different kinds of scenarios… it’s a tool. It isn’t a beauty contest.”— Jon Collins
It’s easy to over-index on features that look great in a demo. The Radar pulls you back to what wins in production: reducing operational overhead, improving security posture, and making distributed systems easier to manage.
What you’ll find in the report:
- A scenario-driven view of the market (not one-size-fits-all rankings)
- Evaluation across the criteria that matter most in enterprise environments
- A comparative lens on maturity, innovation, and platform execution
Why This Report Matters Now: 3 Pillars Shaping Real Outcomes
1) Zero Trust: security without the overhead tax
Jon made the point bluntly: the goal isn’t “zero trust” in theory—it’s zero trust that’s achievable in production. The winning approach is security that scales down as well as up—so smaller teams can enforce strong policy without drowning in manual configuration, exceptions, and constant firefighting.
“It’s about zero trust with minimal overhead… how can you deliver on zero trust without having a team of 20 people?” — Jon Collins
Jim grounded this in how service-to-service policy should work at runtime:
“This application can only talk to this database… and that’s how the zero trust actually should play out in the real world.” — Jim Gaspari
This is the difference between security posture and security theater. Least-privilege policy isn’t a PowerPoint concept—it’s a runtime behavior that reduces blast radius and helps meet compliance requirements with provable controls.
What to prioritize:
- Faster time-to-value through configuration + automation
- Standards alignment and proof for regulated environments
- Least-privilege policies that reflect how systems should actually behave
2) Observability: visibility that drives efficiency, cost control, and security
Observability is “table stakes,” but the right observability is what prevents runaway spend and blame-driven firefighting. If you can’t explain cost and performance in distributed systems, you can’t manage them. And when you can’t manage them, you start paying for uncertainty—extra infrastructure, slower delivery, and longer outages.
“It’s mission critical, costing far more than we thought… and we don’t know why… can we have some more money please?”— Jon Collins
Jim connected observability to business decisions (not just dashboards):
“We layer on top of that user information… who’s doing it, what they’re accessing, when they’re accessing. Greymatter can collect all of those metrics.” — Jim Gaspari
Context turns “data” into action. Knowing what happened is good. Knowing who/what initiated it, what they touched, and how it propagated is what shortens outages, strengthens audits, and supports confident optimization.
What that enables:
- Faster troubleshooting across distributed services
- Usage-based decisions (what to scale, optimize, or retire)
- Earlier detection of risky patterns and misconfigurations
3) Control Plane Architecture: the difference between “having mesh” and running it at scale
Control planes aren’t optional—but flexibility and visibility are where enterprise-grade execution shows up. The control plane isn’t just “management UI.” It’s your ability to operate—to make fast, safe traffic decisions across environments as conditions change.
“It’s not about having a control plane… it’s about having flexibility… and the visibility so you can make these rapid decisions.” — Jon Collins
Jim illustrated what “operationalized” looks like:
“If I’m running three versions of an app, we’ll kick it out, focus on the other two, so the customer does not deal with the problem.” — Jim Gaspari
This is resilience that customers actually feel. The goal isn’t to avoid every incident; it’s to contain impact and keep experiences stable even when systems degrade.
What this unlocks in practice:
- Rapid response decisions based on real runtime visibility
- Resilience through health-aware routing and automated failover
- Hybrid/multicloud traffic control when regions or DCs degrade
Where the Market and Greymatter are Headed
Jon’s thesis: services will get easier to create—but integration, policy, and managed trust become the hard part. The next era of service mesh is less about “getting services to talk” and more about governing interactions—identity, policy, routing, observability, and trust—across an increasingly mixed estate (Kubernetes + VMs + managed services + APIs).
“It’s all about the glue in between. Services commoditize… integration becomes the most important thing…” — Jon Collins
Teams need platforms that reduce drift and keep systems “in the safe zone” with less manual work—because complexity expands faster than headcount.
Jim previewed where Greymatter is investing to stay ahead—supporting what teams actually run (modern + legacy) and what’s coming next:
- Building toward quantum safe encryption visibility and enforcement
- Plans to support HTTP3
- Expanded VM support (including VMware and Azure VMs)
Download Your Copy of the GigaOm Radar for Service Mesh
If you’re responsible for any of the following, the Radar will help you benchmark what matters most:
- Teams modernizing legacy apps while securing east-west traffic
- Platform engineering and SRE leaders operating distributed systems
- Security leaders implementing Zero Trust at the service layer
- Architects standardizing on Kubernetes + hybrid/multicloud
Get the evaluation framework, vendor comparisons, and the criteria that matter most for enterprise deployments.