Service Mesh

A Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer designed to manage network communication between microservices within distributed applications. It provides communication functions without requiring them to be implemented directly within individual applications. Typical capabilities include service discovery, load balancing, traffic management, encryption, authentication and observability. Dedicated proxies are commonly used to control incoming and outgoing traffic for individual services, while a central control plane manages communication policies and configurations. Service Mesh technologies are particularly relevant in Kubernetes and cloud-native environments where large numbers of microservices communicate with each other. Well-known implementations include Istio and Linkerd. A Service Mesh can simplify the management of complex microservice architectures and support the consistent implementation of networking and security policies.