What does "service mesh" refer to in cloud architecture?

Service mesh refers to an infrastructure layer that facilitates communication between microservices in a cloud architecture. It provides a dedicated infrastructure for managing service-to-service communications, handling aspects like load balancing, service discovery, and traffic management. By separating these concerns from the actual application code, a service mesh enables developers to focus on writing business logic without needing to implement networking and communication features directly within their services.

The strength of a service mesh lies in its ability to manage complex interactions within distributed systems, allowing for seamless communication, monitoring, and security between microservices. This means it can help enforce policies, perform retries, and manage failures effectively, which are critical in microservice environments where multiple services interact continuously.

The other options refer to different aspects of cloud architecture. Managing network traffic and optimizing cloud storage are broader concepts that do not specifically target microservices communication as service mesh does. A framework for container orchestration, while related to microservices, primarily focuses on deploying and managing containers rather than the communication patterns between them. Thus, the definition of a service mesh is best captured by its role as an infrastructure layer specifically designed for microservices communication.