Blue-Green vs Canary Deployments: Which Should You Use?
Simple diagrams of blue-green and canary deployments, plus how they compare on rollback speed, infrastructure cost and risk to users.
Cloud & DevOps
What is Service Mesh?
Quick answer
An infrastructure layer that manages communication between microservices, handling traffic routing, security, and monitoring outside the application code.
Service Mesh, explained
In a microservices system, services constantly call each other over the network. A service mesh takes over the common concerns of that traffic, such as encrypting connections, retrying failed requests, balancing load, and recording metrics, usually by placing a small proxy next to each service. Popular examples include Istio and Linkerd.
For example, an e-commerce platform with separate services for catalogue, cart, and payments can use a service mesh to require encrypted, authenticated connections between them and to send a small share of traffic to a new version of the cart service for testing. Service meshes give consistent security and visibility without changing each application. However, they add operational complexity and resource overhead, so they are most useful in larger systems with many services.
Related terms
Kubernetes
An open-source platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications across clusters of machines.
MicroservicesAn architecture style in which an application is built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate over APIs.
ObservabilityThe ability to understand what is happening inside a software system by examining the data it produces, such as logs, metrics, and traces.
Guides that mention Service Mesh
What Is DevSecOps? Building Security Into the Pipeline
DevSecOps moves security checks into each stage of the pipeline. Here is what runs where, how to keep it fast, and a practical order to roll it out.