Glossary
Service Mesh
A service mesh is an infrastructure layer, usually implemented as a network of lightweight proxies alongside each service, that handles cross-cutting concerns of service-to-service traffic — routing, retries, encryption, and often authentication and policy enforcement — outside of each individual service's own code. A service gains mutual authentication and policy checks on its traffic without implementing that logic itself.
Centralizing enforcement this way means a policy change can apply consistently across every service the mesh covers, without touching each service's code individually. It also means the mesh's own configuration becomes a single, high-value target: a misconfigured mesh policy affects every service behind it at once, not just one.