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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.

Related Terms

Health Check
An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.
Environment Variable
A dynamic value stored outside the application code that configures behavior without hardcoding sensitive or environment-specific data.
Pipeline as Code
Defining CI/CD pipeline configurations as version-controlled code files rather than through UI-based pipeline builders.
Kubernetes ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object that stores non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs, injected into pods as environment variables or files.
Observability
The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs through metrics, logs, and traces.
Artifact Repository
A centralized storage system for build artifacts like compiled binaries, packages, and container images used in CI/CD pipelines.
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