Service Mesh
Definition
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture. It provides a transparent and language-independent way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another.
Why It Matters
As microservices architectures grow, managing the communication between services becomes complex. A service mesh abstracts this complexity away from the application code, providing crucial features like service discovery, load balancing, encryption, and observability out of the box.
Contextual Example
A team uses a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd. It deploys a lightweight "sidecar" proxy next to each microservice. All traffic between services is routed through these proxies, which handle tasks like encrypting traffic, retrying failed requests, and collecting detailed metrics, without the application code needing to be aware of it.
Common Misunderstandings
- A service mesh is not a "silver bullet" and adds its own operational complexity. It is typically only necessary for large and complex microservices deployments.
- It focuses on managing "east-west" traffic (service-to-service), as opposed to an API gateway which manages "north-south" traffic (client-to-service).