A service mesh operates at a higher level than container orchestration. A service mesh manages services. The service mesh provides various capabilities that are very necessary when running systems with hundreds and thousands different services such as:

• Dynamic routing
• Latency-aware east-west load balancing (inside the cluster)
• Auto retries of idempotent requests
• Operational metrics

In the past, applications had to address those responsibilities on top of their core functionality. Now, service meshes take the load off and provide an infrastructure layer so that applications can focus on their primary goals.

The most well-known service mesh is Linkered by Buoyant. Linkered supports Kubernetes as well as other orchestrators. But, given the momentum of Kubernetes.

Buoyant decided to develop a new Kubernetes-only service mesh named Conduit (in Rust). This is another testament to the traction of Kubernetes where all the innovation takes place. Another Kubernetes service mesh is Istio. Istio was founded by teams from Google, IBM, and Lyft. It's built on top of Lyft's Envoy and it's moving fast.