"The concept of the service mesh as a separate layer is tied to the rise of the cloud native application. In the cloud native model, a single application might consist of hundreds of services; each service might have thousands of instances; and each of those instances might be in a constantly-changing state as they are dynamically scheduled an orchestrator like Kubernetes. Not only is service communication in this world incredibly complex, it’s a pervasive and fundamental part of runtime behavior. Managing it is vital to ensuring end-to-end performance and reliability."

https://blog.buoyant.io/2017/04/25/whats-a-service-mesh-and-...

The cloud native model combines the microservices approach of many small services with two additional factors: containers (e.g. Docker, which provide resource isolation and dependency management, and an orchestration layer (e.g. Kubernetes), which abstracts away the underlying hardware into a homogenous pool.

A container app that depends on 100 other container apps.

wild guess, the cloud is the machine, and all your application is built on cloud bits connected through and in the cloud

An application I like