ITGSS Certified DevOps Engineer Practice Test

What is the purpose of a service mesh in a microservices architecture?

1. To increase storage capacity

2. To enable faster network connections

3. To add traffic management, monitoring, and policy

4. To replace traditional servers

The correct answer is: To add traffic management, monitoring, and policy

In a microservices architecture, a service mesh serves the critical role of managing service-to-service communications, which encompasses traffic management, monitoring, and the enforcement of policies. This network of microservices often involves complex interactions where numerous services communicate over the network. A service mesh adds a dedicated infrastructure layer for this, ensuring that communication is reliable and secure. Traffic management is a key feature of a service mesh, providing capabilities such as load balancing, service discovery, and routing. This means that as the number of services grows, the service mesh can intelligently direct requests to the appropriate services without requiring significant changes to the service code itself. Monitoring features are also integral to service meshes, allowing developers and operators to observe the behavior of services and their interactions in real time. This visibility is essential for performance tuning and troubleshooting, as it allows teams to quickly identify and respond to issues in the communication between services. Moreover, policy enforcement within a service mesh can help in defining and implementing security and access control measures consistently across different services. This becomes increasingly important in a distributed system where ensuring integrity and security at every level can be challenging. The other options do not accurately capture the primary functions of a service mesh. While increasing storage capacity and enabling faster network connections are important aspects of IT