Service mesh is used to manage communication between microservices within a distributed application. It acts as a dedicated infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication, providing capabilities like service discovery, load balancing, traffic management, security policies, and observability. By abstracting network complexity away from application code, service mesh simplifies service communication, enhances reliability, and enables advanced features such as circuit breaking and retries. Service mesh architectures typically utilize sidecar proxies (like Envoy or Linkerd) deployed alongside each microservice to manage traffic routing and policy enforcement transparently.
You should consider using a service mesh in scenarios where you have a complex microservices architecture with multiple services communicating over a network. Service meshes are particularly beneficial in environments requiring high reliability, scalability, and observability. They provide centralized control over service communication, enabling seamless deployment of new services, dynamic scaling, and efficient traffic management across distributed deployments. Service mesh also facilitates implementing security measures such as mutual TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption between services, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity.
The primary function of a service mesh is to enhance the reliability, security, and observability of microservices communication. It achieves this by intercepting and managing traffic between services, enforcing communication policies, and providing visibility into service interactions and performance metrics. Service mesh architectures typically include components for service discovery (to locate available services), load balancing (to distribute traffic evenly), and telemetry (to monitor and log traffic behavior). By offloading these responsibilities from individual microservices, service mesh improves overall system resilience and operational efficiency.
To use a service mesh in a microservices architecture, you typically deploy a service mesh implementation alongside your microservices. Each microservice instance is then paired with a sidecar proxy, which intercepts incoming and outgoing traffic. The sidecar proxies communicate with each other and with a centralized control plane, which manages configuration, policy enforcement, and monitoring across the service mesh. Configuration of routing rules, load balancing strategies, circuit breaking policies, and security measures (such as mutual TLS) is typically managed through the control plane, providing a centralized way to configure and enforce communication behavior across the microservices environment. This approach ensures consistent, reliable communication between microservices while enabling advanced features for traffic management and observability across distributed deployments.