What are common components found in a service mesh implementation?

• A. Ingress rules and policy store
• B. Data plane and control plane
• C. Front-end and back-end services
• D. Data plane and storage plane

Answer: (B)

A service mesh is built around two main parts: a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is made up of the sidecar proxies that accompany each service, handling the actual traffic between services—the routing, load balancing, mTLS, retries, and collecting metrics. The control plane oversees these proxies, distributing configuration, security policies, and traffic rules, and gathering telemetry so the mesh can enforce policies consistently across the cluster. Tools like Envoy often serve as the data plane proxies, while the control plane components push configurations and manage trust and observability.

The other options mix in related ideas that aren’t the fundamental building blocks of a service mesh. Ingress rules relate to external access, but they aren’t the mesh’s core architectural components. Front-end and back-end services describe application roles, not the mesh structure. A storage plane isn’t a standard part of a service mesh.