Service Mesh

Before getting into service Mesh, let’s try to understand what a Sidecar pattern is?

Sidecar Pattern

When we develop an application that has multiple Microservices talking to each other, it can bring along a lot of complexities. For example, a service needs to implement features like logging, rate-limiting, retry logic, circuit breaker, timeouts, and so on. These features are needed for making sure the service is able to connect to other services and other services can connect to this. But if we look closely, all these features do not add value directly to the business logic implemented by the service and can be considered as an additional burden on the core functionality.

Sidecar

Service Mesh

We just saw how a sidecar can help a Microservice to offload unnecessary complexity outside of the code service. Now think of a scenario where we have multiple services communicate with each other. All services can offload the boilerplate code to sidecars.

image source: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/microservices/what-is-a-service-mesh

A service mesh helps to manage sidecars for all Microservices in a central manner. It helps controls the deployment, configurations, updates of sidecars in a central manner.