An Introduction to Service Meshes

Introduction

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that allows you to manage communication between your application’s microservices. As more developers work with microservices, service meshes have evolved to make that work easier and more effective by consolidating common management and administrative tasks in a distributed setup.

Taking a microservice approach to application architecture involves breaking your application into a collection of loosely-coupled services. This approach offers certain benefits: teams can iterate designs and scale quickly, using a wider range of tools and languages. On the other hand, microservices pose new challenges for operational complexity, data consistency, and security.

Service meshes are designed to address some of these challenges by offering a granular level of control over how services communicate with one another. Specifically, they offer developers a way to manage:

• Service discovery
• Routing and traffic configuration
• Encryption and authentication/authorization
• Metrics and monitoring

Though it is possible to do these tasks natively with container orchestrators like Kubernetes, this approach involves a greater amount of up-front decision-making and administration when compared to what service mesh solutions like Istio and Linkerd offer out of the box. In this sense, service meshes can streamline and simplify the process of working with common components in a microservice architecture. In some cases they can even extend the functionality of these components.