Which core capability is commonly provided by a service mesh in a cloud-native environment?

Which core capability is commonly provided by a service mesh in a cloud-native environment?

• A. Routing traffic based on service versions
• B. Encrypting storage volumes
• C. Scheduling pods across nodes
• D. Distributing and replicating data across multiple services

Answer: (D)

Service mesh capabilities center on controlling and observing how services talk to each other, including routing decisions that can differentiate by service version. Routing traffic based on service versions lets you perform canary releases or gradual rollouts, directing a portion of requests to a newer version while preserving the majority on the stable one. This enables quick feedback and safe rollback if issues appear. The other options fall outside what a service mesh handles: encrypting storage volumes is a storage-layer concern, not about service-to-service communication; scheduling pods across nodes is the job of the Kubernetes scheduler; distributing and replicating data across multiple services is a data management task handled by databases, caches, or data replication systems, not by the mesh.

Service mesh capabilities center on controlling and observing how services talk to each other, including routing decisions that can differentiate by service version. Routing traffic based on service versions lets you perform canary releases or gradual rollouts, directing a portion of requests to a newer version while preserving the majority on the stable one. This enables quick feedback and safe rollback if issues appear.

The other options fall outside what a service mesh handles: encrypting storage volumes is a storage-layer concern, not about service-to-service communication; scheduling pods across nodes is the job of the Kubernetes scheduler; distributing and replicating data across multiple services is a data management task handled by databases, caches, or data replication systems, not by the mesh.