Examples described herein relate to a switch comprising a programmable data plane pipeline, wherein the programmable data plane pipeline is configured to provide microservice-to-microservice communications within a service mesh. In some examples, to provide microservice-to-microservice communications within a service mesh, the programmable data plane pipeline is to perform a forwarding operation for a communication from a first microservice to a second microservice. In some examples, to perform a forwarding operation for a communication from a first microservice to a second microservice, the programmable data plane pipeline is to utilize a reliable transport protocol.