As modern organizations adopt microservices to build scalable and flexible applications, managing communication between these independent services has become a major challenge. With the growth of cloud computing and distributed architectures, information technology (IT) teams face increasing complexity in ensuring reliable, secure, and efficient service-to-service interactions. The truth is that traditional approaches to service management sometimes fall short when handling dynamic and interconnected microservices ecosystems. To address this gap, successful organizations are adopting a service-mesh approach.
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer designed to streamline and optimize microservice communication. By integrating a service mesh into IT infrastructures, organizations can achieve greater control and observability over their service interactions. Whether deployed within Kubernetes clusters or across broader cloud infrastructures, service mesh technology is becoming a cornerstone of modern IT strategy.
Bringing together multiple functions into a single cohesive layer, a service mesh addresses the operational and security challenges inherent to microservices ecosystems. Among the most essential features that define an effective service mesh are:
- Reliability
A service mesh ensures stable and efficient communication by using ‘sidecar proxies’ (lightweight proxies deployed alongside every microservice instance) to manage traffic and enforce policies. This helps maintain consistent performance, even in complex environments. - Security
By embedding encryption and access controls into service-to-service communication, a service mesh protects data in transit. It centralizes the management of authentication and authorization policies, minimizing vulnerabilities as microservices interact across the network. - Resilience
By incorporating mechanisms like retries, circuit breaking, and timeouts, a service mesh strengthens the overall resilience of applications. These features help mitigate the impact of service failures or network disruptions, maintaining the availability of critical services. - Observability
A service mesh provides deep insights into system performance by collecting telemetry data, tracing request flows, and aggregating logs. These features help IT teams monitor service health and identify bottlenecks. They can likewise troubleshoot issues more effectively. - Traffic management
With advanced routing capabilities, a service mesh enables precise control over how traffic flows between services. This includes techniques like traffic splitting for canary deployments, dynamic request routing, and fault injection for testing system behavior under different scenarios. - Decoupled communication
A service mesh separates network management from application logic, ensuring that changes to service communication do not disrupt application functionality. This abstraction simplifies development while maintaining consistent communication practices across the entire system.
API gateways and service meshes are tools for managing communication within microservices architectures. As such, they share many similarities: both enhance connectivity, security, and observability. That said, they operate at different levels of the infrastructure and target separate types of traffic. More specifically, an API gateway differs from a service mesh in the following ways:
- Operational focus
Managing APIs as products is a core objective of an API gateway, often including API versioning, analytics, and developer tools. Conversely, a service mesh focuses on the reliability and resilience of microservices. - Traffic type and scope
API gateways focus on north-south traffic, which involves external requests entering or leaving the system. In contrast, service meshes handle east-west traffic, focusing on communication between services within the system. - Primary function
The main purpose of an API gateway is to act as a central access point, routing external requests, managing authentication, and making API integration between external systems and internal services possible. A service mesh improves internal communication by enabling service discovery and load balancing, and prioritizing secure data exchange. - Deployment location
Positioned at the edge of a network, an API gateway regulates access to internal services. A service mesh operates internally, deploying sidecar proxies alongside microservices to manage communication directly within the infrastructure. - Security approach
External-facing security is a key feature of API gateways, which safeguard access through user authentication, authorization, and IP filtering. Meanwhile, a service mesh focuses on internal cybersecurity by encrypting service-to-service communication and implementing mutual TLS (mTLS) and granular access controls.
As microservices architectures grow in complexity, managing communication between services becomes increasingly difficult. Service mesh offers a powerful solution by centralizing control over service-to-service communication. This carries with it a number of clear advantages.
Service mesh provides a range of capabilities that address critical challenges in distributed systems. These benefits include:
- Service discovery
Manually managing service endpoints in dynamic environments becomes impractical as the number of services grows. Service mesh automates service discovery using a registry to track services and their locations in real time. This capability reduces operational overhead and ensures that services can locate and interact with one another as the environment evolves.
- Traffic management
The ability to control how traffic flows between microservices is essential for maintaining performance and reliability. Service mesh supports advanced features like load balancing, request routing, and traffic splitting, empowering organizations to optimize how they are using their resources.
- Security at scale
Protecting sensitive data within a distributed application is challenging, especially when services engage in frequent communication. Service mesh enforces network security by encrypting traffic and applying fine-grained access controls. This helps secure interactions between services and allows organizations to adopt a ‘zero trust’ security model.
- Observability and traceability
Gaining visibility into the performance and behavior of microservices is crucial for identifying bottlenecks and troubleshooting issues. Service mesh offers built-in observability by collecting metrics, tracing requests across services, and aggregating logs. These insights help IT teams monitor system health and resolve problems more effectively.
- Network automation
Managing service-to-service communication manually can lead to inconsistencies and operational inefficiencies. Service mesh automates key processes like retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking, promoting consistent communication practices across services. This reduces human error and enhances the overall reliability of the system.
- Integration
Adopting a service mesh requires integrating it with existing applications, tools, and workflows, which can be a complicated and time-consuming process. Before committing to anything, organizations should evaluate service mesh solutions for compatibility with their current infrastructure.
- Increased complexity
The introduction of a service mesh adds an additional layer to the application infrastructure, which can increase the potential for misconfigurations. Establish clear governance and adopt best practices for configuration management to simplify operations and reduce errors.
- Learning curve
Service meshes demand specialized knowledge for configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. This can be daunting for teams unfamiliar with the technology. Invest in team training and documentation to help bridge this skill gap, and leverage vendor support to address any specific issues.
While service meshes offer significant benefits, implementing them can present certain challenges. When considering a service-mesh solution, be aware of the following potential concerns:
The data plane is responsible for managing the flow of traffic between microservices. It consists of sidecar proxies designed to handle tasks such as:
- Intercepting and routing requests between services.
- Securing communication by establishing encrypted channels between sources and destinations.
- Implementing resiliency features to maintain service availability during failures or slowdowns.
By managing these functions, the data plane optimizes communication across the network while reducing the burden on individual microservices.
The control plane acts as the central management hub for the service mesh. It provides administrators with tools to define policies, configure routing rules, and enforce security settings. Key responsibilities of the control plane include:
- Maintaining a service registry that tracks all services and their locations within the mesh.
- Automating service discovery by registering new services and removing inactive ones.
- Distributing configurations to the data plane, making it possible for proxies to adapt without interrupting service operations.
- Aggregating telemetry data (i.e. metrics, logs, and traces) to provide insights into system performance and health.
With the control plane, changes to the service mesh configuration—such as updates to security policies or traffic rules—can be applied in real time without requiring service restarts.
Deploying a service mesh isn’t a one-and-done task; ensuring effective integration with the existing microservices architecture typically requires a deliberate approach consisting of multiple steps. Below are the most essential stages involved in implementing a service mesh:
- Assess the current microservices architecture
Begin by evaluating the existing architecture to identify pain points, scalability needs, and areas where resilience could be improved, as this will help establish clear goals and expectations for the service mesh. Create a checklist of desired outcomes to guide the implementation and measure its impact post-deployment.
- Choose the right service mesh solution
Research different service mesh solutions to determine which best fits the goals and the target environment. Conduct proof-of-concept trials to validate compatibility and functionality before committing to a solution. - Develop a phased adoption strategy
Avoid attempting a full-scale implementation all at once. Instead, start with a small subset of services. Use these services to identify potential challenges and fine-tune configurations, before gradually expanding the implementation. Make adjustments as needed.. - Integrate and configure the service mesh
Once the phased strategy is in place, deploy the control plane and sidecar proxies to the pilot services. Use this phase to fine tune service-mesh settings for optimal performance. - Monitor and troubleshoot during and after deployment
Leverage the observability features of the service mesh to monitor metrics, logs, and distributed traces. Establish alerting and incident response processes to quickly identify any issues that may need to be addressed. Regularly review performance and scalability to make sure that the mesh is operating as intended.
Built on the AI-enhanced Now Platform, specialized ServiceNow applications are designed to integrate with mesh technologies and help organizations optimize their service mesh deployments. Service Observability unifies telemetry data into a seamless platform, enabling teams to monitor dependencies, predict potential disruptions, and quickly identify root causes of service issues. Additionally, Service Mapping provides a complete and dynamic view of digital services, illustrating how microservices and infrastructure interact. Together, these solutions empower IT and DevOps teams to maintain high-performing, secure, and resilient service mesh environments.
By leveraging these applications, organizations can employ service-aware operations to diagnose and prioritize problems, optimize traffic flows, and maintain compliance with customer service level agreements (SLAs). Reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR) by pinpointing disruptions faster and ensure reliability with proactive issue detection. Dynamically track microservices within service mesh architectures and visualize the relationships between components. Together, these and additional capabilities give you the power to make your service mesh solution a secure foundation for delivering scalable, secure, and high-performing digital services.
Explore how ServiceNow can transform your approach to service mesh. Schedule a demo today!