This book is about mastering service mesh. It assumes that you have prior knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes. As a developer, knowing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) patterns will be beneficial, but not mandatory.

Service mesh is the new buzzword and a relatively new concept that started in 2017, and so it does not have much history behind it. Service mesh is the evolution of already existing technologies with further improvements.

The first service mesh implementation emerged as Istio 0.1 in May 2017. Istio is a combination of different technologies from IBM, Google, and Lyft, and hence, Istio and service mesh were used interchangeably to mean the same thing.

Envoy (which originated at Lyft and is now open source) is a graduate project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is a core part of Istio. Envoy, as a reverse proxy next to a microservice, forms the core of a service mesh.

William Morgan, the creator of Linkerd, which is an incubating project at CNCF, coined the term service mesh. The term service mesh was boosted when it was used prominently in KubeCon and at the CloudNativeCon 2018 conference in Copenhagen by Jason McGee, an IBM Fellow. 

A service mesh is a framework on top of a cloud-native microservices application. Istio, Linkerd, and Consul are all service mesh implementations.

Linkerd is an open source network proxy and referred to as a service mesh.

Consul is another open source project backed by Hasicorp and is referred to as a service mesh, but it uses different architecture.