A service mesh adds a layer of infrastructure between microservices, handling mTLS, retries, circuit breaking, and traffic routing via sidecar proxies (Envoy). Istio uses sidecar injection; Linkerd uses a lighter Rust-based proxy. VirtualService and DestinationRule control traffic routing — enabling canary deployments (5% → 100%) and A/B testing at the infrastructure level. Service meshes provide L7 metrics (request rate, error rate, latency) for every service-to-service call without code changes.
Each stage in order — click any step to read what it does.
Sidecar proxy pattern and control/data plane.
The trade-offs worth knowing before you build this.
kubectl rolling update moves all traffic gradually but affects all users. Istio VirtualService weight routing lets you send exactly 5% of traffic to canary while keeping 95% on stable — instant rollback.
Setting PeerAuthentication to STRICT mode enforces that every service-to-service call uses mTLS. This eliminates a whole category of lateral movement attacks with zero application code changes.
Envoy sidecar emits RPS, error rate, and p50/p99 latency for every service pair. With Kiali + Prometheus, you get a service topology dashboard without adding any metrics code to your services.
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