Service Mesh
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture. It provides features like traffic management, security, observability, and resilience without requiring changes to application code, typically implemented as a set of network proxies deployed alongside application services. This decouples operational concerns from business logic, enabling consistent management across distributed systems.
Developers should learn and use service meshes when building or operating complex microservices-based applications that require reliable inter-service communication, security enforcement, and monitoring at scale. It is particularly valuable in cloud-native environments with Kubernetes, where it simplifies implementing cross-cutting concerns like mutual TLS, circuit breaking, load balancing, and distributed tracing across hundreds or thousands of services.