Microservice Service Discovery: API Gateway or Service Mesh?

API gateways and service meshes are two technologies that can be used to manage communication between services in a microservice-based application. Both technologies provide similar benefits such as resilience, traffic management, client-side discovery, and system observability. However, they differ in their capabilities, external vs internal communication, monitoring and observability, tooling and support, and maturity. An API gateway operates at the application level, managing business logic and traffic from edge to service, while a service mesh operates at the infrastructure level, dividing application functionality into microservices and managing internal service-to-service communication. While they can co-exist, combining both technologies provides a great end-to-end communication experience. In some cases, using both may be necessary for maximum agility and minimized effort in managing communications.

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