Cloud Service Mesh simplifies the management and security of microservices in a distributed environment. It provides a way to connect, secure, and monitor services across multiple clusters and platforms, including GKE on AWS clusters.
One of the main reasons to use Cloud Service Mesh is to ensure secure communication between microservices. In a microservices architecture, services often communicate with each other across different clusters and cloud providers. Cloud Service Mesh uses the Istio service mesh framework to secure these interactions. It enables features such as traffic encryption and access control policies, ensuring that only authorized services can communicate with each other. This helps to mitigate security risks and protect sensitive data in transit.
Another benefit of Cloud Service Mesh is its ability to provide observability into the behavior of microservices. It integrates with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, to collect metrics, logs, and traces from services. This allows developers and operators to monitor the health and performance of their applications. This visibility is important for identifying and troubleshooting issues, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring the overall reliability of the system. Additionally, Cloud Service Mesh provides traffic management capabilities, such as load balancing, and traffic splitting. This enables teams to implement advanced deployment strategies and perform controlled rollouts of new features or updates.
For more information, see Install Cloud Service Mesh.