Introduction to Service Mesh
While microservices architecture has become increasingly popular over the past few years, monolith applications became obsolete, but, they came with certain problems that monolith applications did not have. Microservices architecture can be complex to design, build, and maintain, as it involves multiple independent services that need to communicate with each other. This can result in an increased workload for developers, as they need to manage and monitor each service separately.
Service Mesh in Kubernetes is a tool that enables services to detect and communicate with each other. It is a dedicated infrastructure layer that provides communication between microservices in a Kubernetes cluster. It offers features such as load balancing, service discovery, and traffic routing, and can also provide additional features such as service-level observability, security, and resilience.
How does Service Mesh work?
In Kubernetes, a service mesh can be implemented using tools such as Istio, Linkerd, or Consul. These tools use a sidecar proxy architecture to manage communication between microservices. Each microservice is deployed with a sidecar proxy, which intercepts all incoming and outgoing traffic and applies policies and rules defined by the service mesh.
With a service mesh in place, Kubernetes cluster administrators can offload many of the networking and security tasks associated with microservices to the service mesh. This can simplify the development and deployment of microservices, as developers can focus on writing code without having to worry about network configuration or security.
Benefits of using Service Mesh
Service discovery: Service meshes provide automatic service discovery and load balancing, making it easy to manage and scale microservices.
Traffic management: Service meshes allow administrators to control traffic flow and apply routing policies based on traffic patterns, performance, and security requirements.
Observability: Service meshes provide observability into the network traffic between microservices, allowing administrators to monitor and troubleshoot issues in real time.
Security: Service meshes provide features such as mutual TLS and access control to secure communication between microservices.
Knowledge and Notes