Authentication implications in a service mesh

Unlike the typical way of designing an OAuth flow, which needs to be designed according to the specific needs of the service or application, the service mesh has the advantage of having out-of-the-box capabilities to oversee authentication.

According to our experience, the killer use case to take advantage of the service mesh for authentication is service-to-service authentication, which, as outlined in the previous chapter, is typically achieved in OAuth by using the client credential flow. This is not how the service mesh typically handles authentication across services. If both services reside in the service mesh, authentication is usually performed by taking advantage of mTLS. The downside to using a certificate as a means to mutually authenticate services is the management of these certificates, which are supposed to expire eventually. A service mesh usually has the capability to automatically manage certificates, which eliminates...