What is a Service Mesh? How Istio and Linkerd Work Explained

#servicemesh

This article was originally published on bmf-tech.com.

Overview

This post summarizes what I have researched about service mesh.

A service mesh is a network infrastructure for managing communication between services (distributed systems).

Generally, it is configured by adding a proxy as a sidecar to the service.

Service Discovery
- Managing service connection information with DNS or load balancers can cause delivery delays
- By entrusting the management of service connection information to the service mesh, delivery delays can be reduced
Service Routing
- By entrusting the routing of traffic between services to the service mesh, the routing of traffic between services can be flexibly changed
Fault Isolation
- ex. Circuit Breaker
Load Balancing
Authentication and Authorization
- Instead of preparing mechanisms for each service, entrusting it to the service mesh can reduce the burden on each service
Observability
- Improves the observability of traffic spanning multiple services
- Enables tracing

The following are disadvantages of service meshes that require a general proxy. Proxyless service meshes (e.g., Traffic Director) are exceptions.