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.

Related Terms

A package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies deploying and managing applications using reusable, configurable charts.

Containerization

A lightweight virtualization method that packages applications with their dependencies into isolated, portable containers.

The acceptable amount of unreliability allowed for a service, calculated as 100% minus the Service Level Objective.

A platform for continuous code quality inspection that detects bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells through static analysis.

Immutable Deployment

A deployment strategy where new versions replace existing instances entirely rather than updating them in place.

A human-readable data serialization language commonly used for configuration files in DevOps tools and applications.

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