Service Mesh

A service mesh is a configurable infrastructure layer for a microservices application. It makes communication between service instances flexible, reliable, and fast. The mesh provides service discovery, load balancing, encryption, authentication and authorization, support for the circuit breaker pattern, and other capabilities.

The service mesh is usually implemented by providing a proxy instance, called a sidecar, for each service instance. Sidecars handle inter‑service communications, monitoring, security‑related concerns – anything that can be abstracted away from the individual services. This way, developers can handle development, support, and maintenance for the application code in the services; operations can maintain the service mesh and run the app.