jargon

Comparison

MicroservicevsService mesh

Microservice

the service you own deploys on its own schedule and you have never waited for another team's release.

A service small enough to be owned, deployed and reasoned about by one team independently of the others. The unit of value is independent deployment, not size — a service that cannot be released without coordinating is not buying you anything. The price is real and permanent: every in-process call you replaced is now a network call that can be slow, partial or absent, and every debugging session now spans machines.

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Service mesh

you get mutual TLS, retries and per-route traffic splitting without changing a line of application code, because a proxy sits next to each instance.

A layer of proxies deployed alongside services, handling routing, retries, mTLS and telemetry uniformly. It moves cross-cutting concerns out of each service's language and libraries. The cost is a substantial amount of operational machinery and a new class of failures that look like application bugs but live in the proxy.

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