X. Service Mesh & Network Security
A service mesh moves cross-cutting network concerns — mTLS, retries, traffic shifting, telemetry — out of application code and into a dedicated infrastructure layer, so every service gets them uniformly without a shared library in every language. The trade is a real tax: added latency per hop, a proxy’s worth of CPU and memory per pod, and a control plane to operate. This part covers the mesh architecture and its sidecar and sidecarless models, plus the network-security layer (network policies, mTLS, certificate lifecycle) that the mesh makes enforceable.
Topics Covered
Section titled “Topics Covered”- 10.1. Service Mesh Architecture: The data plane and control plane split: Envoy, Istio, Linkerd, traffic management, and sidecarless meshes.
- 10.2. Network Policies and mTLS: Closing the flat-network gap: Kubernetes network policies, mTLS, certificate lifecycle, and eBPF networking.