What Is Service Mesh Sidecar Injection?

Sidecar injection is how a service mesh inserts a proxy container alongside the application container in a pod, usually via a mutating webhook at admission time. The proxy intercepts the pod inbound and outbound traffic so the mesh can apply routing, mutual TLS, retries, and metrics. The application code stays unaware of the mesh.

Why it matters

Injecting the proxy automatically means teams get mesh features uniformly without modifying every service. Because injection runs at admission, enabling it for a namespace covers new pods consistently.

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