Mastering API Architecture

Chapter 4. Service Mesh: Service-to-Service Traffic Management

In the previous chapter you explored how to expose your APIs and manage associated ingress traffic from end users and other external systems in a reliable, observable, and secure way using an API gateway. Now you will learn about managing traffic for internal APIs, i.e., service-to-service communication, with similar goals.

At a fundamental level, service mesh implementations provide functionality for routing, observing, and securing traffic for service-to-service communication. It is worth saying that even this choice of technology is not a slam dunk; as with all architectural decisions, there are trade-offs; there is no such thing as a free lunch when you are performing the role of architect!

In this chapter you will evolve the case study by extracting the sessions-handling functionality from the legacy conference system into a new internally facing Session service. As you do this you will learn about the communication challenges introduced by creating or extracting new services and APIs that are deployed and run alongside the existing monolithic conference system. All of the API and traffic management techniques you explored in the previous chapter will apply here, and so your natural inclination may be to use an API gateway to expose the new Session service. However, given the requirements, this would most likely result in a suboptimal solution. This is where the service mesh pattern and associated technologies ...