ITGSS Certified DevOps Engineer Practice Test

What is a service mesh primarily designed to manage?

1. Microservices applications

2. Serverless computing

3. Virtual machines

4. Data pipelines

The correct answer is: Microservices applications

A service mesh is primarily designed to manage microservices applications. It provides a dedicated infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communications within microservices architectures. This includes managing the complexities involved in these interactions such as service discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring, as well as enhancing security with features like mutual TLS for service communication. Service meshes often include functionality for traffic management, ensuring that requests can be routed efficiently between various services while allowing developers to focus on writing business logic without needing to deal with network security, observability, and reliability concerns directly in their code. By abstracting these operations, a service mesh allows for more manageable, observable, and resilient communication between microservices, which is essential when dealing with distributed systems. The other options are less relevant in this context. Serverless computing refers to an architecture where the cloud provider manages the server resources, which is not the focus of a service mesh. Virtual machines involve a different layer of abstraction and management compared to microservices. Similarly, data pipelines are focused on the movement and transformation of data rather than the communication between services, which is the core strength of a service mesh.