What is a service mesh?

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Accepted Answer

An infrastructure layer managing service-to-service traffic — apps offload routing, security and telemetry — A mesh moves cross-cutting communication concerns (routing, mTLS, metrics) into infrastructure proxies. It's not a broker — traffic stays synchronous and point-to-point; not a CNI, which handles IP-level connectivity; and unlike a central gateway, mesh proxies sit next to every workload.

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A message broker between services — requests are queued and delivered asynchronously by the platform

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A Kubernetes network plugin — it assigns Pod IPs and wires the cluster's low-level connectivity

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An API gateway for internal APIs — a central proxy terminates and forwards every service call

What is a service mesh?

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More Service Mesh: Istio & Linkerd flashcards