What Is a Service Mesh?
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that handles communication between microservices, typically via sidecar proxies deployed alongside each service. It provides traffic routing, mutual TLS, retries, and telemetry transparently, so application code does not have to. Meshes like Istio and Linkerd centralize cross-cutting networking concerns.
Why it matters
As service counts grow, reimplementing retries, encryption, and metrics in every service becomes unmanageable and inconsistent. A mesh moves those concerns into a uniform layer, which also gives the fine-grained traffic control needed for canary releases and progressive rollouts.
Related concepts
- Usually implemented with sidecar proxies
- Enables traffic shifting and mutual TLS
- Examples include Istio and Linkerd
Related guides
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