Service mesh

In software architecture, a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between services or microservices, using a proxy (often as a sidecar). Examples of a popular service meshes are Linkerd, a CNCF project, and Istio.

Having such a dedicated communication layer can provide a number of benefits, such as providing observability into communications, providing secure connections, or automating retries and backoff for failed requests.

A service mesh is a relatively simple concept, consisting of a bunch of network proxies paired with each service in an application, plus a set of task management processes. The proxies are called the data plane and the management processes are called the control plane in the Service Mesh. The data plane intercepts calls between different services and “processes” them; the control plane is the brain of the mesh that coordinates the behavior of proxies and provides APIs for operations and maintenance personnel to manipulate and observe the entire network.

See also