What is AWS App Mesh?

AWS App Mesh is a managed version of Service Mesh that AWS provides. App Mesh is designed to be used purely for traffic management of services running in AWS.

What is Service Mesh?

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication over a network. It provides a method in which separate parts of an application can communicate with each other. Service meshes appear commonly in concert with cloud-based applications, containers and microservices.

Proxy and Control Plane

The proxy sits between all service and manages and observes all traffic. The control plane translates intent to proxy config and distributes the proxy config to the proxy servers

What are the alternatives

Istio is one of the most popular in this group of technologies. Istio is not limited to just traffic management, it focuses on other features such as security and observability.