SERVICE-MESH

Sidecar-driven microservices network layer.

Definition

Service mesh consists of a data plane (per-pod sidecar proxy: Envoy, Linkerd-proxy, Cilium) and a control plane (config, certs, telemetry: Istiod, Linkerd Destination, Consul Service Mesh). Automatic mTLS, traffic shifting (canary), distributed tracing, fine-grained RBAC.

Origin

Term popularised by William Morgan (Buoyant) in 2017 ; Istio announced May 2017 ; Linkerd 2.0 in September 2018.

Example in context

A fintech deploys Istio on Kubernetes for automatic mTLS between 200 microservices and 1% canary traffic shifting.

Related terms

• Istio — reference implementation.