Introducing Service Meshes
Service Mesh are an advanced and complex topic. If you have experience using the cloud, Kubernetes, and developing and building an application using microservices architecture, then certain benefits of Service Mesh will be obvious to you. In this chapter, we will familiarize ourselves with and refresh some key concepts without going into too much detail. We will look at the problems you experience when you are deploying and operating applications built using microservices architecture and deployed on containers in the cloud, or even traditional data centers. Subsequent chapters will focus on Istio, so it is good to take some time to read through this chapter to prepare yourself for the learning ahead.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:
- Cloud computing and its advantages
- Microservices architecture
- Kubernetes and how it influences design thinking
- An introduction to Service Mesh
The concepts in the chapter will help you build an understanding of Service Mesh and why they are needed. It will also provide you guidance on identifying some of the signals and symptoms in your IT environment that indicate you need to implement Service Mesh. If you don’t have hands-on experience in dealing with large-scale deployment architecture using Kubernetes, cloud, and microservices architecture, then this chapter will familiarize you with these concepts and give you a good start toward understanding more complex subjects in subsequent chapters. Even if you are already familiar with these concepts, it will still be a good idea to read this chapter to refresh your memory and experiences.
