Service Mesh: Challenges, State of the Art, and Future Research Opportunities

While the technology development towards microservices can significantly improve the speed and agility of software service delivery, it also raises the operational complexity associated with modern applications. This has led to the emergence of Service Mesh, a promising approach to mitigate this situation by introducing a dedicated infrastructure layer over microservices without imposing modification on the service implementations. Aiming to inspire more practical research work in this exploited area, we in this paper present a comprehensive review on the state of the art of Service Mesh and discuss the related challenges and its adoption. Finally, we highlight the opportunities for future research in this subject.