As i sit here at 12:50am . I attempt to answer the question that’s been on my mind for days now. “What the heck is a data plane?”.
To fully understand we need to back track a bit. A data plane is one of two major components of a service mesh , yet that alone is far from the answer i seek.
Taking a closer look
To find the answers i seek, it’s worth taking look at the architecture of a typical service mesh and analyze from there.
istio service mesh architecture
When a request comes into service A on lets /login the data plane ( AKA the sidecar proxy, in this case the envoy instance in the diagram ) is responsible for resolving what service the request is to be forwarded to, collect metrics , perform healthchecks and a bunch of other stuff the service mesh user might have configred it to do.
TL;DR
A data plane is a component of a service mesh responsible for:
- Routing
- Load Balancing
- Health Checks
- Observability
- Service Discovery
Popular examples inclued , Envoy proxy, Nginx , Traefik.