Service mesh architecture

 

A typical service mesh architecture is made up of two network planes.

• The Data Plane (proxy) is responsible for moving application request traffic between all the services. This plane is responsible for things like health checking, load balancing, authentication, authorization, etc.
• The Control Plane provides policy and configuration for all the services in the mesh. It does not touch or care about the network packet, its main job is to configure the data plane.

Popular service mesh projects

Several technologies offer service mesh technologies. The most popular ones are:

• Istio
• Linkerd
• Envoy
• Conduit (now a part of the Linkerd project as Linkerd 2.0)