A look at service meshes

Abstract

Service meshes can be seen as an infrastructure layer for microservice-based applications that are specifically suited for distributed application architectures. It is the goal to introduce the concept of service meshes and its use for microservices with the example of an open source service mesh called Istio. This paper gives an introduction into the service mesh concept and its relation to microservices. It also gives an overview of selected features provided by Istio as relevant to the above concept and provides a small sample setup that demonstrates the core features.