What is Service Mesh?
A service mesh (Istio, Linkerd, Consul) takes concerns like mTLS, retries, timeouts, and traffic shaping out of application code and into the platform. Every service gets the same networking behavior, and platform teams can change policy centrally without touching application code.
Related terms
- Microservices — An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, independently deployable services organized around business capabilities.
- API Contract — A formal specification of an API (OpenAPI, gRPC proto, GraphQL schema) that producers and consumers agree to uphold.