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AWS recently released a new service App Mesh during the 2019 summit which has generated a lot of interest from developers world-wide. This service is a great example of how Amazon is highly customer-focused in delivery of products/features to the market. Besides that, there is no additional charge for using the service!:-) With the advent of cloud, the importance of microservices has increased tremendously. In microservices architecture, large monolithic code-bases/architectures are broken down into smaller, more independent modules. Responsible for highly defined and discrete tasks, these individual modules communicate with each other using APIs.

We are going through an interesting cycle of application decomposition and recomposition. While the microservice paradigm is driving monolithic applications to be broken into separate individual services, the service mesh approach is helping them to be connected back together into well-structured applications. As such, microservices are logically separate but not independent. They are usually closely interdependent and taking them apart introduces many new concerns such as need for mutual authentication between services. Istio directly addresses most of those issues. An issue that arises due to application decomposition and one that Istio doesn’t address is dependency ordering – bringing up individual services of an application in an order that guarantees that the application as a whole comes up quickly and correctly.