Service Mesh - CI/CD Glossary Definition
A service mesh handles service-to-service traffic (routing, retries, mTLS, telemetry) through proxies, without changing application code.
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication (routing, retries, encryption, and observability) transparently, usually via sidecar proxies alongside each workload.
Progressive delivery strategies like canary and traffic mirroring often rely on a mesh. It gives pipelines fine control over how traffic shifts during a rollout.
Why deploys care
A mesh lets a deploy shift a small percentage of traffic to a new version and observe it before completing the rollout, which is the mechanism behind canary analysis.
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