What is a 'service mesh'?

A service mesh is best described as a dedicated infrastructure layer designed to manage service-to-service communications within a microservices architecture. This layer handles a variety of critical functions that are necessary for microservices to communicate effectively, including service discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring, as well as often providing more advanced capabilities like traffic management, security features, and observability.

By using a service mesh, organizations can abstract more of the networking logic away from the application code. This allows developers to focus on building the business logic of their applications while the service mesh takes care of the complexities of inter-service communication. Additionally, since a service mesh can provide a consistent communication approach across different services, it aids in improving reliability and simplifies operational complexity, allowing for better scalability and management of microservices.