Introduction to service meshes and Linkerd

George Mirando, in his book, The Service Mesh, says that a service mesh "is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication in order to make it visible, manageable, and controlled. The exact details of its architecture vary between implementations, but generally speaking, every service mesh is implemented as a series of interconnected network proxies designed to better manage service traffic." In general, we can adopt the idea of a service mesh being built by this interconnected network of proxies that provides manageable, stable, and controlled service-to-service communication.

Now, let’s see how this is implemented, starting with the explanation given in the following diagram:

Figure 8.2 – Service mesh implementation with a sidecar container

Sidecar is a design pattern used on distributed systems that only have a single node. This pattern is commonly used...