What is a service mesh?

Answer

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices, handling traffic routing, load balancing, retries, encryption, and observability without changing application code. It typically works by injecting a lightweight proxy (a sidecar) alongside each service that intercepts all network traffic. Popular implementations include Istio, Linkerd, and Consul. A service mesh is most valuable in large microservice deployments where consistent security, reliability, and telemetry are needed across many services.