Service Mesh
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer dedicated to inter-microservice communication, transparently handling routing, observability, security (mTLS), resilience (retries, timeouts, circuit breakers) and traffic manag…
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer dedicated to inter-microservice communication, transparently handling routing, observability, security (mTLS), resilience (retries, timeouts, circuit breakers) and traffic management (canary, A/B) — without changing the application code.
It typically relies on injecting a sidecar (a proxy like Envoy) next to each service, driven by a central control plane. The service mesh offloads distributed network complexity from the application.
The major implementations are Istio, Linkerd and Consul. In 2026, the rise of sidecar-less designs (Istio Ambient, Cilium Service Mesh based on eBPF) further simplifies operations.