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Stupid Simple Service Mesh — What, When, Why
Recently microservices-based applications became very popular and with the rise of microservices, the concept of Service Mesh also became a very hot topic. Unfortunately, there are only a few articles about this concept and most of them are hard to digest.
In this blog, we will try to demystify the concept of Service Mesh using “Stupid Simple” explanations, diagrams, and examples to make this concept more transparent and accessible for everyone. In the first article, we will talk about the basic building blocks of a Service Mesh and we will implement a sample application to have a practical example of each theoretical concept. In the next articles, based on this sample app, we will touch more advanced topics, like Service Mesh in Kubernetes, and we will talk about some more advanced Service Mesh implementations like Istio, Linkerd, etc.
To understand the concept of Service Mesh, the first step is to understand what problems it solves and how it solves them.
Software architecture has evolved a lot in a short time, from classical monolithic architecture to microservices. Although many praise microservice architecture as the holy grail of software development, it introduces some serious challenges.
For one, a microservices-based architecture means that we have a distributed system. Every distributed system has challenges such as transparency, security, scalability, troubleshooting, and identifying the root cause of issues. In a monolithic system, we can find the root cause of a failure by tracing. But in a microservice-based system, each service can be written in different languages, so tracing is no trivial task. Another challenge is service-to-service communication. Instead of focusing on business logic, developers need to take care of service discovery, handle connection errors, detect latency, retry logic, etc. Applying SOLID principles on the architecture level means that these kinds of network problems should be abstracted away and not mixed with the business logic. This is why we need Service Mesh.
