Service Mesh

Previously we learned how the sidecar pattern attaches a proxy to each service to handle cross-cutting concerns. Now imagine every service in your cluster has a sidecar proxy. These proxies form a network, a mesh, that can observe, control, and secure all service-to-service communication.

This is a service mesh: a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling communication between services.

Instead of embedding networking logic in application code, the mesh handles it transparently. Services send and receive traffic as usual, but the mesh provides traffic management, security, and observability without any code changes.

Service meshes have become a key component of modern microservices infrastructure, particularly for organizations running large numbers of services in Kubernetes.