Service mesh for 5GC: Istio/Linkerd for SBI traffic, mTLS

Why Service Mesh Matters for 5G Core

The 5G Core Service Based Architecture defines dozens of inter-NF communication paths using HTTP/2 and JSON over the SBI. Managing security, observability, and traffic policies for these interactions directly in application code creates complexity and inconsistency. A service mesh like Istio externalizes these cross-cutting concerns into infrastructure. Istio injects a sidecar proxy based on Envoy alongside each NF pod, intercepting all inbound and outbound traffic transparently. This sidecar handles mutual TLS encryption, retry logic, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing without any…