What is a Service Mesh?
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication in microservices architectures. It provides features like mutual TLS, load balancing, traffic management, and observability without requiring changes to application code.
Core Components
Data Plane
- Sidecar proxies
- Handle all traffic
- Policy enforcement
Control Plane
- Configuration management
- Service discovery
- Certificate management
Key Features
Security
- Mutual TLS (mTLS)
- Certificate management
- Access policies
Traffic Management
- Load balancing
- Canary deployments
- Circuit breaking
Observability
- Distributed tracing
- Metrics collection
- Access logging
Resilience
- Retries
- Timeouts
- Rate limiting
Popular Service Meshes
Istio
- Most full-featured
- Envoy-based
- Complex
Linkerd
- Lightweight
- Simple setup
- CNCF graduated
Consul Connect
- HashiCorp
- Service discovery
- Multi-platform
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Control Plane │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
↓ ↓
┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐
│ Service A │ │ Service B │
│ ┌──────────┐ │ │ ┌──────────┐ │
│ │ Sidecar │←┼──┼→│ Sidecar │ │
│ └──────────┘ │ │ └──────────┘ │
└──────────────┘ └──────────────┘
Benefits
- Zero-trust networking
- Consistent observability
- Traffic control
- Language-agnostic
Considerations
- Added complexity
- Resource overhead
- Learning curve
- Debugging challenges