DevOps Dictionary

Service Mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture, handling concerns like secure connectivity, traffic control, and observability without requiring each application to implement them. It typically works by deploying lightweight proxies alongside services and a control plane to configure them, so calls between services can be encrypted, authenticated, routed, retried, rate-limited, and traced consistently across the platform.

With Service Mesh, teams get uniform security policies, reliable traffic behaviors, and end-to-end visibility into latency and errors; without it, those capabilities are usually reimplemented inconsistently in each service, making outages harder to diagnose and policy enforcement easier to miss. This gap exists because as microservices grow, cross-cutting networking and security logic becomes distributed across many codebases unless it is centralized in the platform layer.