I'm a developer; should I care about a service mesh?

Understanding what problems a service mesh is designed to solve and leveraging its capabilities is key for application developers. This allows you to focus on the pieces you need to build your application and deliver business value. Neeraj Poddar dissects which service mesh capabilities you should care about and explores common questions from platform teams.

A disruptive technology pattern like a service mesh is exciting, but it can also be confusing as it straddles various concerns and responsibilities ranging from SecOps to application developers. Neeraj Poddar dissects service mesh capabilities using Istio as an example, focusing on the pieces you should care about, and explores how you can offload some of the logic traditionally baked into the applications—distributed tracing and telemetry, request retries and timeouts, mutual transport layer security (TLS) and end user validation, and service decomposition—into a common infrastructure layer. Neeraj then walks you through some of the questions you should be asking your platform team, such as if you need to update your applications to use service mesh and whether or not the sidecars will downgrade your application performance, as you adopt a service mesh environment.