Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery » FAQ
What is a service mesh?
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication, often adding traffic policy, mTLS, retries, and observability without embedding those concerns in application code. It is most useful in complex microservice environments.
Practical guidance
- Adopt a mesh only when service communication complexity is already high.
- Treat mesh policy as code with review and staged rollout.
- Understand latency and operational overhead before broad adoption.
- Start with a narrow scope and expand after proving operational benefit.