What is a service mesh in cloud environments

Question

Our system is growing, and we have several different services interacting with each other. How can a service mesh help manage traffic flow, load balancing, and monitor the interactions between these services in a cloud environment?

Answer 1

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls the communication between different services in a given microservices architecture. It can manage complex tasks such as traffic routing, load balancing, authentication, encryption, and observability without changing application code.

Below you can see how service mesh in cloud environment works:

• Data Plane: Lightweight proxies (e.g., Envoy deployed next to each service) manage network traffic between services, enforce policies, encrypt communications, and collect telemetry.

• Control Plane: This provides centralized management for configuring proxies, enforcing security policies, and monitoring the network. It lets administrators dynamically change configurations without modifying applications.