What is Service Mesh?
A dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication in microservices.
A Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication transparently — without changing application code. It provides mTLS encryption, traffic management (routing, retries, circuit breaking), and detailed observability (request metrics, traces) for all service communication. Traditional service meshes use sidecar proxies (Envoy) injected into every pod. Newer eBPF-based meshes (Cilium) work at the kernel level without sidecars. Istio, Linkerd, and Cilium are the main options.
Deep Dive Guide
what is a service mesh explained simply
Related Terms
More Networking Terms
API Gateway
A server that acts as entry point for APIs, handling routing, auth, and rate limiting.
Cilium
eBPF-based networking, security, and observability for Kubernetes clusters.
CNI (Container Network Interface)
A specification and plugins for configuring network interfaces in Linux containers.
eBPF
A Linux kernel technology for running sandboxed programs without changing kernel source code.
Istio
A service mesh that adds mTLS, traffic management, and observability to Kubernetes services.
Network Policy
A Kubernetes resource that controls which pods can communicate with each other.
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