Service meshes provide a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication within a distributed application. They offer features such as traffic management, security, and observability without requiring code changes to individual services. Two prominent implementations of this concept are offered by Amazon and Google, respectively.
The adoption of a service mesh simplifies the complexity of modern microservice architectures. This technology allows development teams to focus on business logic by offloading concerns such as retries, circuit breaking, and authentication. This centralized control promotes consistency, reduces operational overhead, and enhances the overall reliability of distributed systems. Historically, the rise of microservices necessitated a solution to manage their intricate communication patterns, leading to the development and evolution of these technologies.