In the pages that follow we will give you a solid background into the challenges of microservices, explain what a service mesh is, describe how a service mesh works, and explore the current service mesh landscape. Starting with Chapter 2, we’ll use Istio as our main ser‐ vice mesh implementation to explain how to set up and use a service mesh. We’ll describe the Istio architecture and explore Istio’s observ‐ ability, traffic management and security capabilities. You don’t have to understand and consume all service mesh features at once. You can instead adopt features incrementally and still enjoy some of the benefits service mesh offers. To that end, we take an