Chapter 1. About OpenShift Service Mesh

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh adds a transparent layer on existing distributed applications without requiring any changes to the application code. The mesh introduces an easy way to create a network of deployed services that provides discovery, load balancing, service-to-service authentication, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring. A service mesh also provides more complex operational functionality, including A/B testing, canary releases, access control, and end-to-end authentication.

Microservice architectures split the work of enterprise applications into modular services, which can make scaling and maintenance easier. However, as an enterprise application built on a microservice architecture grows in size and complexity, it becomes difficult to understand and manage. Service Mesh can address those architecture problems by capturing or intercepting traffic between services and can modify, redirect, or create new requests to other services.

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh provides a number of key capabilities uniformly across a network of services: