The Service Mesh Landscape in 2023

Service mesh technologies have become essential for managing service-to-service communication in modern distributed applications, particularly within microservices architectures. They provide an infrastructure layer that supports service discovery, load balancing, traffic management, security, and observability without altering application code, thereby simplifying the deployment and scaling of applications. Popular service mesh platforms include Istio, Linkerd, Consul, AWS App Mesh, and Google Anthos Service Mesh, each offering unique features and integration capabilities. Despite challenges such as complexity, performance overhead, and limited support for legacy applications, service meshes are increasingly adopted, with usage rising from 27% in 2020 to 47% in 2022 according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. As the landscape evolves, with new solutions and trends like ease of use and standardization, service meshes are poised to expand into new use cases beyond microservices, such as serverless and edge computing environments, offering organizations a more secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure.