Service Mesh Traffic Simulator - Learn mTLS, Traffic Splitting, and Circuit Breakers
Service Mesh Traffic Simulator
Learn how service meshes solve real production problems through interactive scenarios
beginner
Scenario 1 of 6
🎯 The Problem: Insecure Communication
Your services talk directly without encryption
Service A
Frontend
⚠️ No Protection
Unencrypted Data
Service B
API
⚠️ No Protection
Anyone can read this data!
The Problem
Two services are sending data over the network. But there's a problem: anyone can read the messages! No encryption, no authentication, no control.
The Solution
This is risky in production. One compromised service could impersonate another. Let's see how a service mesh solves this.
Keyboard Shortcuts:
Space/Enter Play/Pause←/→ NavigateR Reset
Understanding Service Mesh
Core Concepts
Sidecar Proxy: A proxy (like Envoy) deployed alongside each service to handle all network traffic.
Control Plane: Manages and configures the sidecar proxies (e.g., Istiod, Linkerd controller).
Data Plane: The collection of sidecar proxies that actually handle traffic.
mTLS: Mutual TLS encrypts service-to-service communication and verifies identities.
Traffic Management
Traffic Splitting: Route a percentage of traffic to different versions (canary deployments).
Retries: Automatically retry failed requests with exponential backoff.
Circuit Breaker: Prevent cascading failures by stopping requests to unhealthy services.
Timeouts: Set maximum wait time for requests to avoid hanging.
💡 Key Benefits
- • Security: Automatic mTLS encryption without code changes
- • Observability: Detailed metrics, logs, and traces for all service communication
- • Resilience: Built-in retries, circuit breakers, and timeouts
- • Traffic Control: Canary deployments, A/B testing, and traffic mirroring
Popular Service Meshes
Istio
Uses Envoy proxies, feature-rich control plane (Istiod), extensive traffic management and security features. Most widely adopted.
Linkerd
Ultra-light, uses custom Rust-based proxies, minimal resource overhead, simpler configuration, CNCF graduated project.
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