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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

Service Discovery
A mechanism that automatically detects and tracks the network locations of service instances in distributed systems.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of unreliability allowed for a service, calculated as 100% minus the Service Level Objective.
Trunk-Based Development
A source control strategy where developers integrate small changes directly into the main branch frequently, often multiple times per day.
Infrastructure Drift
The divergence between the actual state of infrastructure and its defined desired state, caused by manual changes or untracked modifications.
Canary Deployment
A deployment strategy that gradually rolls out changes to a small subset of users before deploying to the entire infrastructure.
Packer
A tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single configuration file.
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