The service mesh architecture is an application infrastructure layer on top of cloud-native applications. Service mesh has gained popularity since 2017, and it is still a relatively young concept. A service mesh provides a layer of abstraction above your applications. For example, this could be used to decouple security from the application. The service mesh could secure communication between the microservices with TLS. The benefit here is that each developer no longer has to implement TLS encryption and decryption that's specific to the language they are writing in.

In this chapter, we will walk through a quick overview of the origin of the service and understand how it can be viewed as a decoupling agent between the provider (dev) and the consumer (ops). We will also understand basic and advanced service communication through smart endpoints and trust between microservices and then wrap this up with a quick glance at its architecture.

In a nutshell, we will cover the following topics:

• Service mesh overview
• Shifting Dev responsibilities to Ops
• Service mesh rules
• Service mesh architecture