Microservices and cloud-native design come with their own set of problems. Communication between different services, observability, debugging, rate limiting, authentication, access control, and A/B testing may be challenging even with a limited number of services. When the number of services rises, so does the complexity of the aforementioned requirements.
That's where a service mesh enters the fray. In short, a service mesh trades off some resources (necessary to run the control plane and sidecars) for an automated and centrally controlled solution to the aforementioned challenges.
