DevOps Advanced

What is Service Mesh?

An infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication, providing load balancing, encryption, and observability.

A service mesh adds networking capabilities to microservices without modifying application code. Sidecar proxies (e.g., Envoy) handle traffic management, mutual TLS encryption, retry logic, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing.

Popular service meshes include Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect. Benefits include consistent security policies, traffic control (canary routing), and observability. The complexity cost means service meshes are mainly valuable at scale with many microservices.

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Related Terms

A file containing build rules and commands that automates compilation and common project tasks using the make utility.

An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects time-series metrics using a pull-based model.

A branching model for Git that defines a strict workflow with feature, develop, release, hotfix, and main branches.

A practice where Git repositories serve as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration.

Semantic Versioning

A versioning scheme using MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH numbers that communicates the nature of changes in each release.

An open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying software through configurable CI/CD pipelines.

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