This document discusses service meshes and their role in microservices architectures. It notes that as systems move to microservices, there is increased complexity in deployments, redundancy, and other issues. Service meshes aim to address problems like service discovery, security, circuit breaking, and metrics across services. While service meshes help with these problems, they also introduce additional complexity that requires consideration.

1. Service Mesh Wars
Omar Mekky
@cousine
Director of Engineering @Swvl

2. Hello!

3. Facts about
Swvl
● Cairo, Alexandria, Nairobi and Islamabad
● 2 million Bookings/Month
● 20K avg Requests per minute, 60K during peak
● Kubernetes cluster of 45 nodes
● Service oriented architecture (19+ Services)

4. We are hiring!
swvl.workable.com

5. Service Mesh: Some Context

6. The era of Microservices
● Increase velocity & productivity of teams
● Distribute the complexity of systems
● More flexibility in technology choices (Polyglot Systems)
● Better circuit breaking
● Cheaper scaling

7. But...
● Increased complexity of deployments
● Increased risk of redundancy
● Orphan repositories
● Security
● Latency

8. The traditional approach

9. In Reality...

10. Several issues
● Low portability (service coupling & hardcoded IPs)
● Service discovery
● Security (am I allowed to talk to that service? is that service allowed to talk to
me?)
● Circuit breaking (when should I drop my request to service A)
● Metrics

11. So...

12. Enter: Service Mesh

13. What is a Service Mesh?
* Reference image courtesy of https://glasnostic.com

15. Service Mesh: Caveats

16. Demo

17. Questions?

18. THANK YOU!
Please feel free to reachout:
iam@cousine.me
omar.mekky@swvl.com