>A sidecar is an alternative to an application-level library for something that needs to be present in every instance I see where you're coming from there; but

>A sidecar is an alternative to an application-level library for something that needs to be present in every instance I see where you're coming from there; but it's worth also being explicit that it may be the only option (rather than an alternative) if, e.g. you do not own the code for which you're running the sidecar. Good examples here are sidecar proxies for service meshes: you're probably doing TLS termination and authorization in the proxy, and the underlying service might be a closed-source database with a binary protocol you know nothing about.