Problem Statement
What is a service mesh in Kubernetes and when might you use it in production?
Explanation
A service mesh (for example Istio or Linkerd) provides a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication, traffic routing, resilience features (retry, circuit breaker), observability (metrics, tracing) and security (mTLS, policy enforcement). You’d use a service mesh when you have many microservices, need fine-grained control of traffic, or want to implement advanced features like canary, chaos testing or service level objectives. In smaller deployments it may add complexity so consider trade-offs.
