There are many reasons why Kubernetes is a popular container runtime platform for distributed applications. One of these reasons is the portability and flexibility that it provides to IT architects. However, the difficulties of service discovery, infrastructure reliability, and security are known challenges that result from these benefits. From challenges, opportunities are created, and many tools have risen to mitigate common problems faced by teams that benefit from containerized applications on Kubernetes.

A service mesh is a pattern that aims to mitigate some of these challenges when architecting an application on Kubernetes. By providing a dedicated service layer to facilitate service discovery and how applications share information with each other, they provide security, tracing, monitoring, and traffic control.