Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Understanding the relationship between Kubernetes and a service mesh

At first glance, the service mesh sounds very similar to Kubernetes itself. Kubernetes deploys the kubelet and the kube-proxy into each node and the service mesh deploys its own proxy. Kubernetes has a control plane that kubelet/kube-proxy interacts with, and the service mesh has its own control plane that the mesh proxies interact with.

I like to think of a service mesh as a complement to Kubernetes. Kubernetes is primarily in charge of scheduling pods and providing it with the flat networking model and service discovery, so different pods and services can communicate with each other. This is where the service mesh takes over and manages this service-to-service communication ...