In the previous chapters, we have seen many of Istio’s features and the capabilities they enable within a mesh on a single cluster. However, a service mesh is not bound to a single cluster; it can span many clusters and provide the same capabilities across all of them. In fact, a mesh’s value increases when more workloads are part of it.
But when would we want a service mesh to span multiple clusters? What are the benefits of a multi-cluster service mesh compared to a single cluster? To answer those questions, let’s revisit the fictitious ACME Inc., which moved to a cloud platform and experienced all the networking complexities added by microservice architectures.