Istio, Linkerd — sidecar proxies for traffic management, mTLS, observability, and resilience.
Five passes over the same idea, each from a different angle. Do them in order, or jump to whichever you need.
A service mesh adds infrastructure-level networking capabilities to microservices. Sidecar proxies handle mTLS encryption, traffic routing, retries, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing. Istio and Linkerd are popular implementations. Consider a service mesh when microservices complexity grows.
