What is Service Mesh?

A Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication in microservices. It provides service discovery, load balancing, encryption, observability, retries, and circuit breaking—without changing application code. Think of it as networking autopilot for microservices. Common tools: Istio, Linkerd, Consul. Only needed when you have 10+ microservices and networking complexity is painful.

When Should You Use This?

Use a service mesh when you have many microservices (10+) and managing service-to-service communication is painful, when you need consistent observability across services, or when implementing security/retry logic in every service is tedious. Don't use until microservices complexity justifies it—adds operational overhead. Most startups never need a service mesh.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• •Adopting too early—service mesh adds complexity, wait until 10+ services
• •No monitoring—service mesh itself can fail, needs observability
• •Wrong tool—Istio is powerful but complex, Linkerd is simpler
• •Ignoring performance—service mesh adds latency (usually <10ms)
• •Not training team—service mesh concepts (sidecar proxies, control plane) require learning

Real-World Examples

• •Lyft—Built Envoy proxy, now used by Istio for service mesh
• •Airbnb—Uses service mesh for microservices observability
• •Large enterprises—Service mesh for security and compliance across services
• •Cloud-native apps—Kubernetes + service mesh for complex deployments