Service Mesh (Istio, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) overview

A service mesh architecture layered on top of Kubernetes using Istio for traffic management, mutual TLS, circuit breaking, and canary deployments. Prometheus collects mesh telemetry while Grafana renders service topology and latency dashboards. OpenTelemetry provides distributed tracing across all mesh-enrolled services. Linkerd serves as a lighter-weight alternative for teams that need simpler operational overhead. Targeted at platform teams running 20+ microservices that need zero-trust networking and fine-grained traffic control. The tradeoff is significant resource overhead from sidecar proxies and complex debugging of mesh-layer failures.