A service mesh is an infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication. Especially in the microservice world, the application at hand might contain hundreds of thousands of services. The network topology can be very complicated here. A service mesh can provide the following:
- Traffic management (such as A/B testing and canary deployment)
- Security (such as TLS and key management)
- Observability (such as providing traffic visibility. This is easy to integrate with monitoring systems such as Prometheus (https://prometheus.io/), tracing systems such as Jaeger (https://www.jaegertracing.io) or Zipkin (https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin), and logging systems)
There are two major service mesh implementations on the market—Istio (https://istio.io) and Linkerd (https://linkerd.io). Both of these deploy network proxy containers alongside the application...
