Introducing service meshes
Before jumping into the definition of the service mesh, let’s reiterate quickly what we’ve learned previously about the architecture of cloud-native applications.
Modern cloud-native applications rely on microservices that work together as a part of bigger applications and communicate with each other over a network. Those microservices are packaged as container images and run with the help of an orchestration system such as Kubernetes. The nature of cloud-native applications is highly dynamic, and the number of running containers varies a lot depending on the current load and infrastructure events or outages.
Consider a situation where you are responsible for running an application your company has developed that consists of 20 different microservices. You have implemented autoscaling for all services and in the peak load times, the number of running containers goes well over a hundred (e.g., several container replicas for each service...
