The Service Mesh is focused on connecting various services, securing communications between them, and monitoring their performance in real time. It also provides a control plane, enabling policies and configurations to be updated at once in real time for all data planes within the service mesh. Many benefits result from using a Service Mesh, but here are a few of the highlights: 

• Increased interoperability: A service mesh extends the functionality of SDN routing features for integrated microservice environments in support of web, mobile, and SaaS application code. 

• Enhanced microservice discovery: A service mesh improves network configuration and management through better microservice discovery. 

• Detailed real-time monitoring and analytics of network activity: A service mesh can increase observability by accessing backend processes and web server hardware for more detailed real-time monitoring and analytics of network activity. 

•  Powerful automation of web and mobile scripts: Developers can script service mesh functionality through YAML files or utilities like Vagrant, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, etc., to build powerful automation of web and mobile scripts at scale. This type of architecture is required to support complex SaaS applications in production in enterprises. A service mesh provides coordination for thousands or millions of containers running simultaneously in the cloud. Since Kubernetes has become the new standard for containerized applications, Service Mesh works well for Kubernetes deployments. 

• Increased security: The Service Mesh enhances security in many ways and enables a control plane that makes it easy to implement policies on a global scale. Because the service mesh provides centralized control for applications, security teams can deploy policies across all microservices at one time without the need to redeploy entire applications. That ensures all apps within the company are protected by the same security policies. The Service Mesh also enables the authentication of end-user credentials. The authentication process can be moved out of the individual application if desired. Instead, the control over authentication and authorization can be consolidated and managed at the company level. 

• Safe Rollout of Deployments: Service Mesh provides the option of blue/green deployments to enable application updates without service interruptions. For more information on blue/green deployments, see our blog on Kubernetes deployments. 
  

A service mesh works through discovery and routing applications that are installed on every VM instance or node in an elastic web server network to register running microservices by IP address. A central registry is used for configuring, managing, and administering all of the microservices that run simultaneously on a network. The service mesh can be referenced by parallel applications operating at the various layers of a web server, data center, or application to extend interoperable functionality through data analytics and network monitoring. This leads to increased data center automation at the level of IP routing, SDN definitions, firewall settings, filters, rules, and cloud load balancing.  

API connections can reference the service mesh for definitions of where to discover running applications and microservice features for data transfers or required processing activity. Elastic web server platforms that scale automatically with Kubernetes use Istio as the central registry and configuration management utility for microservice discovery. Elastic web server platforms like AWS EC2 and Kubernetes utilize the service mesh for managing multiple copies of cloud applications in simultaneous runtimes while synchronizing changes to master database and storage information. A service mesh permits the application layer to communicate with the webserver, internet, and data center network resources through APIs, or vice versa, depending on the microservice or code requirements. 

A service mesh is based on an abstraction layer that is installed across VMs or containers in a cloud data center. Code is installed on every VM or node, which communicates with a central administration software instance that runs the data center orchestration. Service mesh solutions like VMware NSX and Istio rely on Envoy to create the data plane at the node level. Envoy manages information related to the running microservices, licensed IP addresses, HTTPS encryption, active database formats, etc., for every VM or node. With NSX this includes distributed firewall integration at the level of the hypervisor. In elastic cloud networks, the data plane information for each VM or node is used for load balancing. API connections rely on service mesh architecture for inter-application routing requirements. Telemetry at Level 7 of the service mesh includes DNS, HTTP/S, SMTP, POP3, FTP, etc.