Service Mesh

A mesh of sidecar proxies manages service-to-service traffic transparently.

infra

Detailed Description

A service mesh moves traffic management into infrastructure. It is powerful when many services need consistent security and telemetry.

Adopt it when the operational benefit is worth the added platform complexity.

Visual Diagram

Service Mesh Topology
  ServiceA                  ServiceB
  [App] ←→ [Proxy] ←────→ [Proxy] ←→ [App]
                  ↕                ↕
           [Control Plane: Istio]
           configures all proxies
           handles: mTLS, tracing,
                    retries, load balance

Tradeoffs

Pros

Uniform traffic policy and observability

Cons

Operational complexity and resource overhead

Examples: Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect