Glossary · Critical cloud · Microservices
Service mesh: governing communication between microservices
A service mesh is the layer that manages communication between an application's microservices —with implementations such as Istio or Linkerd—. Without touching each service's code, it provides mutual encryption (mTLS), traffic observability and route control, and enables a Zero Trust posture on the internal network.
What it solves
- mTLS — mutual encryption and authentication between services, so that every internal call is encrypted and its origin verified.
- Observability — metrics, traces and logging of traffic between services, without instrumenting each application by hand.
- Traffic control — routing, retries, limits and progressive rollouts managed from the mesh.
- Network policies — centralized rules of who can talk to whom, the basis of a zero-trust architecture.
Why it matters in banking and insurance
When you break a system into microservices, the internal network fills with calls that were traditionally assumed to be trustworthy just because they were inside. The service mesh breaks that assumption: it encrypts and authenticates every communication with mTLS and applies centralized policies of who can talk to whom, enabling network Zero Trust. For a financial institution, that provides both security control and the observability and traffic traceability that DORA's operational resilience framework expects to be able to demonstrate.
How Vermont Solutions helps
Microservices with mesh security and observability
Vermont modernizes critical systems toward microservices architectures with a service mesh, providing mTLS, traffic control and observability of internal traffic as the basis of network Zero Trust.
See legacy modernization →Fuentes
Last updated: 2026-06-21. Editorial content by Vermont Solutions, citable with attribution.