Service Mesh

A Service Mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication. It’s usually implemented as lightweight network proxies (Sidecars) deployed alongside the application code.

When to Use

• Mature Microservices: You have 20+ services and managing retries, timeouts, and auth in each language is becoming a nightmare.
• Zero Trust Security: You need mTLS (Mutual TLS) between all services.
• Observability: You need uniform metrics (Gold signals) and tracing across a polyglot stack.

Core Concepts

Sidecar Proxy

The mesh injects a proxy (e.g., Envoy) next to your app container. Your app talks to localhost, the proxy handles the network magic.

Control Plane

The brain that configures the proxies (e.g., Istio Control Plane).

Data Plane

The set of proxies that actually route the traffic.

Features

• Traffic Management: Canary deployments (1% traffic to v2), Circuit Breaking, Retries.
• Security: mTLS rotation, Authorization policies.
• Observability: Automatic metrics (latency, success rate) without code changes.

Best Practices

Do:

• Assess if the Complexity is worth it. For small clusters, it’s overkill.
• Use simpler alternatives (Linkerd) if Istio is too heavy.
• Start with Observability features before enabling strict enforcement/mTLS.

Don’t:

• Don’t use a Service Mesh to fix bad application code.
• Don’t ignore the resource overhead (CPU/RAM) of sidecars at scale.

References

• Istio
• Linkerd
• The Service Mesh Pattern