Around 2016, the term “service mesh” appeared to spring from nowhere in the arenas of microservices, cloud computing, and DevOps in. However, as with many concepts within computing, there is actually a long history of the associated pattern and technology.

The arrival of the service mesh has largely been due to a perfect storm within the IT landscape. Developers began building distributed systems using a multi-language (polyglot) approach, and needed dynamic service discovery. Operations began using ephemeral infrastructure, and wanted to gracefully handle the inevitable communication failures and enforce network policies. Platform teams began embracing container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, and wanted to dynamically route traffic in and around the system using modern API-driven network proxies, such as Envoy.

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