software architecture Software architecture is the fundamental structure of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations. ...

, a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between

services Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a p ...

microservices A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightw ...

, using a

proxy Proxy may refer to: * Proxy or agent (law), a substitute authorized to act for another entity or a document which authorizes the agent so to act * Proxy (climate), a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate ...

. A dedicated communication layer can provide a number of benefits, such as providing

observability Observability is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. In control theory, the observability and controllability of a linear system are mathematical duals. The concept of observa ...

into communications, providing secure connections, or automating retries and backoff for failed requests. A service mesh consists of network proxies paired with each service in an application and a set of task management processes. The proxies are called the data plane and the management processes are called the control plane. The data plane intercepts calls between different services and “processes” them; the control plane is the brain of the mesh that coordinates the behavior of proxies and provides APIs for operations and maintenance personnel to manipulate and observe the entire network. The service mesh architecture is implemented by software products like Istio,

Linkerd The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution. It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open sour ...

Consul Consul (abbrev. ''cos.''; Latin plural ''consules'') was the title of one of the two chief magistrates of the Roman Republic, and subsequently also an important title under the Roman Empire. The title was used in other European city-states throug ...

, AWS App Mesh, Kuma, Traefik Mesh, and

Open Service Mesh Open Service Mesh (OSM) is a free and open source cloud native service mesh developed by Microsoft that runs on Kubernetes. Overview OSM is written in the Go programming language and designed to be a reference implementation of the ''Service Me ...

. Many service meshes use the

Envoy Envoy or Envoys may refer to: Diplomacy * Diplomacy, in general * Envoy (title) * Special envoy, a type of diplomatic rank Brands *Airspeed Envoy, a 1930s British light transport aircraft *Envoy (automobile), an automobile brand used to sell Bri ...

proxy on the data plane.

References

Software architecture {{software-eng-stub

See also

References