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Understanding Service Mesh

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh provides a platform for behavioral insight and operational control over your networked microservices in a service mesh. With Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, you can connect, secure, and monitor microservices in your OpenShift Container Platform environment.

Understanding service mesh

A service mesh is the network of microservices that make up applications in a distributed microservice architecture and the interactions between those microservices. When a Service Mesh grows in size and complexity, it can become harder to understand and manage.

Based on the open source Istio project, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh adds a transparent layer on existing distributed applications without requiring any changes to the service code. You add Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh support to services by deploying a special sidecar proxy to relevant services in the mesh that intercepts all network communication between microservices. You configure and manage the Service Mesh using the Service Mesh control plane features.

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh gives you an easy way to create a network of deployed services that provide:

  • Discovery

  • Load balancing

  • Service-to-service authentication

  • Failure recovery

  • Metrics

  • Monitoring

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh also provides more complex operational functions including:

  • A/B testing

  • Canary releases

  • Access control

  • End-to-end authentication

Service Mesh architecture

Service mesh technology operates at the network communication level. That is, service mesh components capture or intercept traffic to and from microservices, either modifying requests, redirecting them, or creating new requests to other services.