Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Practice Test 2025 - Free CKAD Practice Questions and Comprehensive Study Guide

A service mesh is fundamentally different from traditional service discovery due to its advanced capabilities that extend beyond the mere identification of services within a microservices architecture. While traditional service discovery primarily facilitates finding and connecting to services within a network, a service mesh encompasses a broader range of features.

The correct choice highlights that a service mesh includes advanced functionalities such as traffic management, which allows for smart routing of requests between services based on various criteria (e.g., load balancing, A/B testing). It also encompasses enhanced security features, such as mutual TLS for secure service-to-service communication, and comprehensive monitoring and tracing capabilities that provide insights into the health and performance of services.

This holistic approach to managing communication between services in a microservices environment allows developers to enforce policies, manage failures gracefully, and maintain observability without having to add extensive code to individual services. As a result, organizations adopt service meshes to improve their operational efficiencies when managing complex architectures.

In contrast, while service discovery is a prerequisite for efficient communication in a microservices setup, it does not inherently provide the robust features that a service mesh offers, which are critical for modern application delivery and operational management in distributed systems.