Service Mesh
Infrastructure layer managing communication between microservices.
Definition
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices, handling concerns like service discovery, load balancing, authentication, and observability. The mesh typically uses sidecar proxies deployed alongside each service instance.
Service meshes extract common networking concerns from application code, enabling consistent policies across services regardless of language or framework. They've become standard infrastructure for complex microservice deployments.
Why It Matters
As systems grow into many services, consistent networking behavior becomes essential. Service meshes provide that consistency without embedding network logic in every service.
For platform teams, service meshes solve cross-cutting concerns at the infrastructure level.
Examples in Practice
The service mesh enforces mutual TLS between all services without any application code changes.
Automatic retries and circuit breaking in the mesh improve resilience without developers implementing these patterns.
Mesh observability provides request tracing across services, enabling rapid debugging of distributed system issues.