Google Cloud Service Mesh

Google Cloud Service Mesh (formerly Anthos Service Mesh) is a managed service mesh built on Istio that helps you monitor and manage the reliability, observability, and security of your microservices. It provides a uniform way to connect, secure, and observe services across GKE clusters and on-premises environments.

Key Features:

1. Mutual TLS (mTLS) - Automatic encryption and authentication between services with zero code changes.

2. Observability - Automatic telemetry (metrics, logs, traces) for every service-to-service call.

3. Traffic management - Fine-grained routing, traffic splitting, retries, and circuit breaking via Istio APIs.

4. Security policies - Authorization policies to control which services can communicate with each other.

5. Multi-cluster - Manage service mesh across multiple GKE clusters in different regions.

The below example shows how to enable mTLS and configure traffic policies using Cloud Service Mesh.

It gives the following output when checking mesh status,

gcloud container fleet mesh describe
Name: projects/my-project/locations/global/features/servicemesh
State: ACTIVE
Clusters:
  my-cluster: ACTIVE (mTLS: STRICT)
Services monitored: 24
mTLS compliance: 100%

Cloud Service Mesh Benefits:

Zero-trust security - mTLS ensures all service-to-service communication is encrypted and authenticated without code changes.

Automatic observability - Service maps, golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) collected automatically for all services in the mesh.