itsual Service Mesh
Overview
A service mesh provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for service-to-service communication, often handling mTLS, retries, observability, and traffic shaping.
When to Use
- Many services need consistent mTLS, retries, or traffic policies
- You want to avoid implementing these concerns in every application
- Complexity of the mesh is justified by the number of services and requirements
Key Capabilities
- Mutual TLS and identity between workloads
- Traffic management (routing, canaries, fault injection)
- Observability (metrics, traces, logs) for service communication
- Policy enforcement
Principles
- Don’t adopt a mesh prematurely — it adds operational complexity
- Prefer simpler solutions (libraries, gateways, platform features) when they suffice
- Treat the mesh as critical infrastructure with its own reliability needs
Verification
- Mesh provides clear value over simpler alternatives
- Failure modes of the mesh itself are understood
- Operational ownership is clear