Enterprises have long relied on monolithic applications to run their operations and provide different functions and services to their customers. Monolithic software is designed to be self-contained; components of the program are interconnected and interdependent. If any program component requires an update, the whole application must be redeployed. As enterprises continue to grow their customer base, they will need to upgrade and scale their monolithic architecture.

When you have an annual event at school or university, the teacher always assigns separate tasks to different groups of students. Have you ever wondered why she does that? Well, not only does it lighten the load on her but working in a group also makes you more productive and offers you more choices than when you were working alone. In addition, you learn to organize and coordinate with teams and ultimately produce a better result.

In this world of technology, meaningful and understandable software can be controlled easily. While designing the application's architecture, loose coupling between the services is necessary, meaning services should behave as a standalone application. This kind of architecture is called service-oriented architecture because, in this architecture design, we mainly focus on designing separate services and using them to make the whole application.

Today, API-driven microservices applications are a source of speed to innovation and competitive advantage – according to SmartBear’s most recent State of Software Quality – API report: However, this modern way of architecting software doesn’t come without challenges. Neglecting to adapt a new approach to service architecture design with a new approach to the underpinnings – API design and testing – can undermine the efforts.

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages traffic, also known as communication, between services in applications composed of containerized microservices. It is a critical component in a microservices architecture, responsible for the secure, fast, and reliable communication between services. This article answers a lot of the questions you may have about service meshes: What are they and how do they work? Who is using them and why?

Finding efficient ways to process, share, and reuse functionality and data is crucial – it’s an important way to break down monolithic applications into more consumable and maintainable microservices. In today’s API-focused world, this translates into multiprotocol development (gRPC, GraphQL, EDAs, etc.) and an enhanced development process (governance, standards, design-first). To understand this, we need to look more closely at protocols.