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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

Prometheus
An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects time-series metrics using a pull-based model.
Chaos Engineering
The discipline of deliberately introducing failures into a system to test its resilience and identify weaknesses before they cause outages.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
The practice of managing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes.
Makefile
A file containing build rules and commands that automates compilation and common project tasks using the make utility.
Vault
A tool by HashiCorp for securely managing secrets, encryption keys, and certificates with dynamic secret generation.
Service Discovery
A mechanism that automatically detects and tracks the network locations of service instances in distributed systems.
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