What is a Service Mesh? What is a Service Mesh? A Service Mesh is a system that carries the requests and responses that microservices send each other. This traffic ultimately travels from Pod to Pod the same way it always has, but by passing through a Service Mesh layer as well much more advanced observability and control is possible. Think of a Service Mesh as a smarter network. Service Meshes are at the forefront of Cloud Native infrastructure. As Kubernetes revolutionised compute—the execution of services—Service Meshes are a massive value-add in networking. They’re also replacing a lot of boilerplate that used to happen in application code, but which is better done by the infrastructure. Much as projects like Terraform made the infrastructure team’s lives better, a Service Mesh is something that microservice developers and owners can use to better operate their applications. Service Meshes also augment the features of these applications, offering real top-line value, not just