A service mesh is a dedicated layer that provides secure service-to-service communication for on-prem, cloud, or multi-cloud infrastructure.
Service meshes are often used with a microservice architectural pattern, but can provide value in any scenario where complex networking is involved.
Service meshes typically consist of a control plane, and a data plane. The control plane maintains a central registry that keeps track of all services and their respective IP addresses, this is called _service discovery_.
As long as the application is registered with the control plane, the control plane will be able to share with other members of the mesh how to communicate with the application and enforce rules for who can communicate with each other.
The control plane is responsible for securing the mesh, facilitating service discovery, health checking, policy enforcement, and other similar operational concerns. The data plane handles communication between services.
Many _service mesh_ solutions employ a sidecar proxy to handle data plane communications, and thus limit the level of awareness the services need to have about the network environment.
