Service Mesh Architecture Explained
The Silent Traffic Controller
When Lyft engineers deployed hundreds of microservices in 2016, they faced a brutal reality: every service needed identical networking code—retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, load balancing, encryption. Copy-pasting this logic into each service became a maintenance nightmare. Their solution? Extract networking entirely from application code into a dedicated infrastructure layer. This became Envoy, the foundation of modern service mesh.
