What are the two main components of a Service Mesh?

What are the two main components of a Service Mesh?

• A. Ingest and Egress
• B. Nodes and Pods
• C. Data Plane and Control Plane
• D. API Server and Controller

Answer: (C)

A service mesh is built around two parts: a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is the actual traffic path between services, typically implemented with lightweight proxies (often as sidecars) that handle forwarding, retries, load balancing, mTLS, and observability data. The control plane provides centralized configuration, policy management, service discovery, and security settings, telling the proxies how to behave and collecting telemetry. This separation lets traffic be managed and secured consistently across services without embedding policy logic in each service. Other options mix networking directions or Kubernetes components: ingest and egress describe traffic directions rather than architectural roles; nodes and pods are Kubernetes primitives; API Server and Controller are Kubernetes control-plane components, not specific to a service mesh.

A service mesh is built around two parts: a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is the actual traffic path between services, typically implemented with lightweight proxies (often as sidecars) that handle forwarding, retries, load balancing, mTLS, and observability data. The control plane provides centralized configuration, policy management, service discovery, and security settings, telling the proxies how to behave and collecting telemetry. This separation lets traffic be managed and secured consistently across services without embedding policy logic in each service.

Other options mix networking directions or Kubernetes components: ingest and egress describe traffic directions rather than architectural roles; nodes and pods are Kubernetes primitives; API Server and Controller are Kubernetes control-plane components, not specific to a service mesh.