API Gateway vs Service Mesh - Guide

We explain the difference between a service mesh and an API gateway and help you understand which tool you should be using.

Today, we talk about a hot topic: the difference between an API gateway and a service mesh. An API Gateway is used to manage traffic into your cluster, we call this north-south traffic. A service mesh manages traffic between services within your cluster, we call this east-west traffic.

One of the sources of confusion between API gateways and service meshes is that there is some overlapping functionality when building cloud native applications. For example, you need common semantics around resilience and common functionality around observability.

This video explains the key differences between API Gateways and service meshes as well as some different use cases for either technology:

API Gateway vs Service Mesh

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