Service Mesh Implementation

Table of Contents

• [Overview](#overview)
• [When to Use](#when-to-use)
• [Quick Start](#quick-start)
• [Reference Guides](#reference-guides)
• [Best Practices](#best-practices)

Overview

Deploy and configure a service mesh to manage microservice communication, enable advanced traffic management, implement security policies, and provide comprehensive observability across distributed systems.

When to Use

• Microservice communication management
• Cross-cutting security policies
• Traffic splitting and canary deployments
• Service-to-service authentication
• Request routing and retries
• Distributed tracing integration
• Circuit breaker patterns
• Mutual TLS between services

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# istio-setup.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: istio-system
  labels:
    istio-injection: enabled

---
apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
metadata:
  name: istio-config
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  profile: production
  revision: "1-13"

  components:
    pilot:
      k8s:
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 500m
            memory: 2048Mi
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Enable mTLS for all workloads
• Implement proper authorization policies
• Use virtual services for traffic management
• Enable distributed tracing
• Monitor resource usage (CPU, memory)
• Use appropriate sampling rates for tracing
• Implement circuit breakers
• Use namespace isolation

❌ DON'T

• Disable mTLS in production
• Allow permissive traffic policies
• Ignore observability setup
• Deploy without resource requests/limits
• Skip sidecar injection validation
• Use 100% sampling in high-traffic systems
• Mix service versions without proper routing
• Neglect authorization policies