What is AWS App Mesh?
AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that standardizes and monitors communication between microservices. The service uses Envoy proxies as sidecar containers that provide traffic routing, observability, and security at the application level.
App Mesh abstracts service-to-service communication from application code and enables uniform traffic policies across different container platforms.
Core Features
- Traffic Routing: Weighted routing for canary deployments and A/B tests
- Service Discovery: Automatic detection of services via AWS Cloud Map
- Observability: Metrics, logs, and traces via CloudWatch and X-Ray
- mTLS: End-to-end encryption between services
- Health Checks: Automatic detection and rerouting on service failures
Typical Use Cases
Microservices Communication: Uniform policies for retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers across all services. Developers don’t need to implement communication logic in application code.
Traffic Control: Gradual rollouts of new service versions with percentage-based traffic splitting. Immediate rollback on problems by changing routing configuration.
Observability: Central view of service communication with latency metrics, error rates, and distributed tracing without code changes in services.
Benefits
- No additional costs for mesh management
- Cross-platform for ECS, EKS, and EC2
- Consistent policies without application changes
- Native integration with AWS observability tools
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with AWS App Mesh: architecture design for microservices, migration to service mesh, and implementation of observability strategies.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What does AWS App Mesh cost?
AWS App Mesh itself is free. You only pay for the compute resources used (EC2, ECS, EKS) and Envoy proxy traffic. No additional fees for mesh management.
Which container platforms does App Mesh support?
App Mesh supports Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and EC2-based workloads. The service works with Docker containers and Kubernetes pods.
How does App Mesh work with Envoy?
App Mesh uses Envoy as a sidecar proxy. Each service receives an Envoy proxy that intercepts traffic, applies routing rules, and sends metrics to CloudWatch and X-Ray.
Can I use App Mesh for canary deployments?
Yes. App Mesh enables traffic splitting between service versions. You can direct traffic percentage-wise to new versions and gradually increase it.