Over the past years, service meshes have emerged as a critical but hidden component of the cloud-native stack. High-traffic companies like Paypal, Netflix, and more have all added a service mesh to their production applications. Linkerd is an open source service mesh for cloud-native applications that became an official project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. However, there is istio, conduit, kong, consul, aspen mesh. and many more. But what is a service mesh, exactly? Do we need more than one? And why is it suddenly relevant? This presentation explains the service mesh concept and provides a broad overview of the field.

TL;DR; A service mesh merely creates a network abstraction that is transparent to the service/application instances to simplify the managing of containerized applications and makes it easier to dynamically route, monitor and secure microservice-based applications. It enables resilient and fault-tolerant communication and traffic management between service instances of a microservice architecture.