{{Short description|Infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communication}} {{Incomprehensible|date=March 2022}} In software architecture, a '''service mesh''' is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between services or microservices using a proxy.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Mg3aDwAAQBAJ |page=39 |title=Mastering Service Mesh: Enhance, Secure, and Observe Cloud-native Applications with Istio, Linkerd, and Consul |author1=Anjali Khatri |author2=Vikram Khatri |year=2020 |isbn=9781789611946 |publisher=Packt Publishing}}</ref>
A dedicated communication layer can provide numerous benefits, such as providing observability into communications, providing secure connections, and automating retries and backoff for failed requests.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jF2yDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3 |page=3 |title=Istio: Up and Running, Using a Service Mesh to Connect, Secure, Control, and Observe |author1=Lee Calcote |author2=Zack Butcher |year=2019 |isbn=9781492043751 |publisher=O'Reilly Media}}</ref>
A service mesh consists of network proxies paired with each service in an application and a set of task-management processes. The proxies are called the data plane and the management processes are called the control plane. The data plane intercepts calls between different services and processes them; the control plane is the brain of the mesh that coordinates the behavior of proxies and provides APIs for operations and maintenance personnel to manipulate and observe the entire network.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qBvCDwAAQBAJ |page=103 |title=Getting Started with Istio Service Mesh: Manage Microservices in Kubernetes |author1=Rahul Sharma |author2=Avinash Singh |year=2019 |isbn=9781484254585 |publisher=Apress}}</ref>
The service mesh architecture is implemented by software products such as Istio, Cilium, Linkerd, Consul, AWS App Mesh, Kuma, Traefik Mesh, and Greymatter.io. Many service meshes use the Envoy proxy on the data plane.<ref>{{Cite web|title=servicemesh.es|url=https://servicemesh.es/|access-date=2021-09-02|website=servicemesh.es|language=en-us}}</ref>
== See also == * Service-oriented architecture * Microservices * Proxy server * Kubernetes
== References == {{reflist}}
Category:Software architecture
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