How Service Mesh Prevents a Microservices Mess

The importance of microservices workflow is crucial for creating and managing applications in a way that best suits the organization's needs.

Digital Delivery
-
6 min
Digital Delivery
/
How Service Mesh Prevents a Microservices Mess

Service mesh microservices are an essential part of the modern IT landscape. They allow organizations to create and manage applications in a way that best suits their needs.

What is a service mesh?

Service mesh is an emerging network architecture that solves one of the most pressing problems faced by those implementing a microservices-based system.

service mesh

A service mesh provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating communication between services. A service mesh is designed to make the network more intelligent.

When new developers enter the microservice environment without a clear understanding of how things work, they can be prone to make mistakes.

These mistakes can lead to poor performance or even downtime for your application—and these consequences will not only disappoint existing customers but also scare away future ones!

Service Mesh is one solution that helps prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. It provides all-around protection for your microservices and infrastructure, improving performance and availability while reducing operational complexity.

This post will explore what service mesh is and why it's so valuable today.

The microservice mess

The more services you have, the easier it is for dependencies to sneak in and cause chaos.

The idea behind microservices architecture was that smaller chunks of code would be deployed independently so they could operate at a higher efficiency rate—but now there's risk involved with this kind of approach.

The problem lies in your ability to manage all these different pieces efficiently; as we add on new features or functions, our gateway becomes too congested from handling them simultaneously.

Why should you care about service mesh?

Service mesh is emerging as the backbone of today's modern, distributed systems. It manages traffic and is designed to make networks more intelligent.

A service mesh can solve one of the most pressing problems when implementing a microservice-based system: facilitating communication between services.

It provides all-around protection for your infrastructure while improving performance and availability.

Microservices have emerged as an essential part of today's IT landscape.

Still, they come with challenges that need solving—control over service discovery, security policies for shared libraries, or secrets management—and these require new technologies to be solved effectively.

They also offer benefits such as increased scalability, agility, and reliability, which far outweigh any disadvantages associated with them.

The top benefits of implementing a service mesh are:

  • Service meshes are a new type of technology that manages traffic between microservices
  • Service meshes make it easier to build, deploy, and maintain microservices
  • Service meshes provide features like API management and load balancing
  • The service mesh can also be used for security purposes when using containers. With mesh services, you can automatically secure your services with authentication and authorization. It also allows encrypted communication to keep all of your data safe.
  • It provides observability features such as distributed tracing and viewing the frequency of HTTP error codes.
  • A service mesh is different from a traditional proxy in that it allows for more orchestration capabilities than just routing traffic
  • They make it easier to manage your application's dependencies by using a common interface rather than relying on custom scripts or code built into each microservice.
  • Mesh services allow you to use blue/green deployments to reduce downtime and risk by running two identical production environments. Blue is for mission-critical features, while green contains the latest updates with a live environment that mirrors what's in development so bugs can be fixed before they are released publicly.

How does service mesh work?

A service mesh is a system of interconnected, branching proxies that run alongside every "service" in your network.

The data plane translates and forwards packets to other services while the control plane manages which routes are used for each packet based on information from both planes themselves and external sources like routing tables or state databases.

The data plane runs alongside each service as a proxy "sidecar."

A sidecar is an auxiliary container that runs alongside a primary service. Sidecars can be created to provide things like logging, health checks, or other features without the need for any changes to your services.

The control plane is like the "boss" of a data center. It takes charge and supervises all parts of the data plane, ensuring each instance is functioning correctly.

Just like a boss would track projects assigned to employees, so does an operator use telemetry gathered through the control plane to understand what's going on at any given time if something wrong happens that requires quick action.

Conclusion

We've explored the importance of a service mesh in a microservice architecture. We hope you have found our exploration helpful and now see how it can help your organization scale to meet demand with ease.

Service mesh is an integral part of the microservice architecture because it helps keep requests in a specific order and protects against security threats.

It can be challenging to scale your applications without it, but you should have no problem keeping up with demand as long as you plan ahead with the right tools.

If this sounds like your issue, we'd love to hear from you!

Our team at Adservio has years of experience building scalable architectures that handles millions of transactions per second using Kubernetes etc., for our clients worldwide.

We would love to help you build a system that scales seamlessly, so contact us today and see what we can do for you.

Published on
February 16, 2021

Industry insights you won’t delete. Delivered to your inbox weekly.

Other posts