What is Service Mesh?

Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages interactions between microservices in a distributed system. It provides functions such as routing, load balancing, security, observability, and traffic management without modifying the code of the services themselves.

Main components of Service Mesh:

• Data Plane: a set of proxies (sidecars) deployed alongside each service that intercept all network traffic.
• Control Plane: a centralized component that manages proxy configurations and policies.

Examples of using Service Mesh:

• Automatic encryption of traffic between services (mTLS).
• Service version management and canary releases.
• Metrics collection and request tracing for monitoring.

Popular implementations: Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect.