Service Mesh
A service mesh uses sidecar proxies to intercept service-to-service traffic, providing observability, traffic control, and security without changing application code.
Purpose
Uniformly manage inter-service communication, decoupling networking logic from business code.
Mechanism
A sidecar proxy (Envoy) is injected into every Pod. The control plane (Istio/Linkerd) configures proxy rules. Provides: mTLS, retries/circuit breaking, load balancing, canary releases, distributed tracing.
Use cases
- Microservice communication
- Traffic management
- Observability