AWS App Mesh (retired)
What to use instead
Section titled “What to use instead”- Amazon ECS Service Connect is the path AWS documents for migrating existing App Mesh workloads on Amazon ECS. It provides service discovery, traffic routing and per-service connection metrics without running your own control plane.
- Amazon VPC Lattice covers service-to-service connectivity, authentication and observability across VPCs and accounts, including Amazon EKS workloads. It is reached through service-network VPC endpoints rather than a sidecar proxy per task.
- An open-source service mesh — Istio, Linkerd or Envoy configured directly — remains an option where you need mesh features neither managed service offers, at the cost of running the control plane yourself.
What App Mesh did
Section titled “What App Mesh did”App Mesh was a managed service mesh: an infrastructure layer for service-to-service communication, implemented as an Envoy proxy deployed alongside each service. It handled traffic routing and shaping, retries and timeouts, circuit breaking and service discovery, and gave a consistent view of traffic between services without changes to application code.
Its model was built from virtual services, virtual nodes, virtual routers with routes, and virtual gateways for ingress, all inside a named mesh. A common use was weighted traffic shifting: sending a percentage of requests to a new version of a service and increasing it once the new version proved healthy. Amazon ECS Service Connect and VPC Lattice both offer equivalents of that capability.
Source
Section titled “Source”What is AWS App Mesh?, AWS App Mesh User Guide, checked 10 September 2026.