What is the role of service mesh in cloud native?

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer designed to handle service-to-service communication in cloud-native applications. It provides features like traffic management, service discovery, load balancing, encryption, authentication, and observability without requiring changes to application code.

Key Roles of Service Mesh:

1. Traffic Management – Controls how requests are routed between services, enabling features like A/B testing, canary releases, and circuit breaking.
2. Security – Manages mutual TLS (mTLS) for encrypted communication and enforces access policies between services.
3. Observability – Collects metrics, logs, and traces to monitor service health and performance.
4. Resilience – Implements retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers to handle failures gracefully.

Example:

In a microservices architecture, if Service A needs to call Service B, the service mesh (e.g., Istio or Linkerd) intercepts the request, applies routing rules, encrypts the traffic, and monitors the interaction. If Service B is slow or unavailable, the service mesh can reroute traffic or return a fallback response.

For cloud-native deployments, Tencent Cloud Service Mesh (TCM) provides a managed service mesh solution, integrating seamlessly with Kubernetes to simplify service governance while ensuring security and scalability.