Service mesh is a new technology addition to cloud computing that aims to make the platform more efficient and flexible. In the service mesh, each service is separated from the other, which makes the system effortless to operate and monitor.

In Service Mesh, you can determine and resolve issues easily, as well as scale up or down the services as required. Moreover, service mesh comes with an in-built load balancing and auto-scaling method, which can further enhance capacity and flexibility. [1]

Figure 1. Service Mesh

Service Mesh is shown in figure 1. A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication over a network. This method enables separate parts of an application to communicate with each other. Service meshes appear commonly in concert with cloud-based applications, containers and microservices.

Service mesh benefits and drawbacks

A service mesh addresses some large issues with managing service-to-service communication, but not all. Some advantages of a service mesh are as follows:

• Simplifies communication between services in both microservices and containers.
• Easier to diagnose communication errors, because they would occur on their own infrastructure layer.
• Supports security features such as encryption, authentication and authorization.
• Allows for faster development, testing and deployment of an application.
• Sidecars placed next to a container cluster is effective in managing network services.

Some downsides to service mesh are as follows:

• Runtime instances increase through use of a service mesh.
• Each service call must first run through the sidecar proxy, which adds a step.
• Service meshes do not address integration with other services or systems, and routing type or transformation mapping.
• Network management complexity is abstracted and centralized, but not eliminated -- someone must integrate service mesh into workflows and manage its configuration. [2]

Service meshes are one layer of your infrastructure and don't bring all that you need. They do give you the ability to bridge the divide between your infrastructure and your application in ways most people have not previously seen, however. Service meshes and where they layer into the infrastructure makes them ripe with possibility beyond what they are being used for today. [3]

References:

1. https://www.31west.net/blog/future-of-cloud-computing/
2. https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/service-mesh
3. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-enterprise-path/9781492089353/ch05.html

Cite this article:

SGokula Nandhini K (2023), Service Mesh, Anatechmaz ,pp.81