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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