A dedicated infrastructure layer that handles service-to-service communication between microservices, using a proxy.
A Service Mesh (such as Istio) manages the interactions between services in a distributed AI environment. It encrypts traffic automatically with mTLS, handles advanced routing (for example, canary deployments for new LLM versions), and produces detailed observability telemetry, which reduces the operational load on DevOps teams.
See also Observability, Air-Gapped Environment, Role-Based Access Control and Zero Trust Architecture.