Deciphering the Difference Between a Service Mesh and API Gateway

David Mooter
Level Up Coding
Published in
13 min readJul 21, 2020

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Istio logo representing service meshes in general vs. AWS’ API gateway logo representing API gateways in general.

In a microservices architecture, apps trade the rigidity and stability of the call stack for the flexibility and chaos of the network. Concerns such as latency, outage retries, security, and traceability that were not a concern with a call stack become a concern with a service call. Service mesh is a pattern that has arisen to take these concerns out of the hands of coders so…

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With over 20 years of experience in IT, David is an analyst at Forrester Research covering modern application architecture. Articles here are his own opinion.