Service Mesh and Service Discovery

Service Discovery Pattern

In a microservices architecture, services are typically deployed in isolation of each other and run on different hosts or in different environments and may run on different hosts or in different environments. As a result, it can be challenging for services to find each other and communicate, as they may not have a fixed IP address or they may be deployed or scaled dynamically.

Service discovery pattern is used to create microservice architectures that are more scalable, flexible, and resilient as it allows services to discover each other and communicate with each other across networks.

By providing a service registry that contains a list of all of the available services and their network addresses, the service discovery pattern addresses this problem. A service can query the service registry in order to find the network address of another service. In this way, it is possible for services to discover one another dynamically, and the system can scale and evolve more easily as a result.

Both the service discovery pattern and service mesh facilitate communication between services in distributed systems. The service discovery pattern is a design pattern that is appropriate for small systems, whereas the service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that is more appropriate for large, complex distributed systems.

Service Mesh

Containers and container orchestrators, like Kubernetes, have resolved numerous challenges by packaging services with their own runtimes and efficiently mapping them to machines. What about effective management of inter-service communication. This is where the concept of a service mesh comes into play.

The service mesh serves as a powerful design pattern that abstracts the underlying network infrastructure, providing a standardized solution by deploying sidecar proxies alongside your services. These proxies, often leveraging technologies like the Envoy proxy, handle critical networking tasks, security enforcement, and observability.

By incorporating a service mesh, you can streamline your operational processes significantly. Service developers no longer need to invest excessive time and effort. Here are some features provided by service mesh.

• Load Balancing
• Observability
• Security
• Service discovery
• Retry of failed requests
• Circuit breaking
• Multi-tenancy
• Optimized communication
• Improved reliability

Source: Mastering Cloud-Native Microservices by Chetan Walia

Thanks for reading. Subscribe for more articles :)