thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

DevOps & Automation · Intermediate

Service Mesh

An infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication with traffic management, mTLS security, and observability, usually via proxies.

Definition

A mesh has a data plane of proxies (sidecars or node-level ambient proxies) and a control plane that configures them. It enables retries, timeouts, circuit breaking, canary routing, and uniform telemetry without changing application code.

Example

Istio enforces mutual TLS between all services in the mesh and splits traffic 90/10 for a canary.

Exam tip

Service mesh handles east-west (service-to-service) traffic; ingress handles north-south.

Related terms