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1 | Copyright © 2019
The Truth About the
Service Mesh Data Plane
Christian Posta
@christianposta
Global Field CTO – Solo.io

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2 | Copyright © 2019 @christianposta
CHRISTIAN POSTA
• Field CTO @ Solo.io
• Author of a few books
• Contributor to many open-source projects
• Architect, blogger, speaker, mentor, leader
@christianposta
christian@solo.io
https://blog.christianposta.com
https://slideshare.net/ceposta

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3 | Copyright © 2019 @christianposta
MY BOOKS
https://bit.ly/istio-in-action
https://www.manning.com/dotd
50% off code:
dotd111819au

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4 | Copyright © 2019 @christianposta
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

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The Service Mesh Journey with Solo.io
Solo.io connects and manages the world’s applications
with APIs and service mesh across any infrastructure.
Announcements coming today 

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Challenges of adopting a service mesh

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• Do you have a mix of application languages or frameworks?
• Large deployment of microservices on cloud infrastructure?
• Struggling to implement application interaction observability?
• Have you mastered your existing infrastructure stack?
Do you need a service mesh?
https://speakerdeck.com/thockin/weve-made-quite-a-mesh
Check out talk from @thockin:

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8 | Copyright © 2019 @christianposta
• Which one to choose?
• Who's going to support it?
• Multi-tenancy issues within a single cluster?
• No good way to manage multiple clusters?
• Fitting with existing services (sidecar lifecycle, race conditions, etc)
• What's the delineation between developers and operations?
• Non container environments / hybrid env?
• Centralization vs decentralization
Challenges of adoption

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9 | Copyright © 2019 @christianposta
• Start at the edge
• Start with one proxy, grow to more
• Pick a subset of traffic/applications
• Get demonstrable value from it
• Continue with measurable iterations
• Data plane matters!
A sensible way to start with service mesh:
learn your data plane!

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Confusion in the data plane

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• API Gateway vs service mesh?
• North/south vs east/west
• Sidecar vs shared proxy?
• Envoy vs nginx vs linkerd proxy vs others?
• What needs to go into my code?
What do I pick? They seem to overlap!?

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The truth about the data plane

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Service mesh gives a nice API into application networking.

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How that API gets implemented will vary.

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Data plane as a spectrum
Implemented
in code
Out of process
sidecar proxy
Shared gateway
per domain
Single centralized
gateway

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• Performance is paramount, cannot use sidecar proxy
• Need fine-grained circuit breaking or other resilience
measures
• More complicated load balancing involving business logic
• Cannot deploy a sidecar
Implemented as code
When to do
Watch out for:
• Tightly intertwined with your application
• Can be difficult to change
• Trying to maintain multiple language implementations

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Implemented as code: example, Consul Service Mesh
func main() {
client, _ := api.NewClient(api.DefaultConfig())
svc, _ := connect.NewService("my-service", client)
defer svc.Close()
// Get an HTTP client
httpClient := svc.HTTPClient()
// Perform a request, then use the standard response
resp, _ := httpClient.Get("https://userinfo.service.consul/")
}

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Implemented as “sidecar” proxy
• Cannot modify applications
• Have multiple languages/frameworks
• Overhead is minimal relative to the app
• Need a high level of decentralization
When to do
Watch out for:
• Not understanding underlying proxy technology
• Race conditions when starting alongside app
• Updating when making changes
• Leaking proxy-specific information (ie, headers, etc)

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Sidecar example: Linkerd
Service
Code
Service
Code

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Implemented as shared domain gateway
• Cannot use or not ready for sidecar
• Provide a single entry point for group of related services
• Enforce boundaries
• Decoupling of API
When to do
Watch out for:
• Extra hops
• Insecure communication last mile
• Noisy neighbor

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Shared gateway example: Istio ingress-gateway

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Shared gateway example: Gloo

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Implemented as central gateway
• When just starting out
• Expect a single central point of ingress/egress
• Operational complexity of other approaches too high for
current situation
When to do
Watch out for:
• Workflow bottleneck
• Insecure communication last mile
• Noisy neighbor

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Implemented
in code
Out of process
sidecar proxy
Shared gateway
per domain
Single centralized
gateway
Data plane API
CNCF Working Group: Unified Data Plane API

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• Universal, cross-client/server data plane management API
• CNCF governed working group; UDPA-WG
• Mailing list: udpa-wg@lists.cncf.io
• Charter and future development work:
https://github.com/cncf/udpa
• Development work Q1-Q3 2020, intercept the Envoy v4 xDS
API EOY 2020
Universal Data Plane API

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Things at the data plane heating up!

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Data plane getting very interesting…

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Data plane getting very interesting…
https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy-wasm

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Now with beta Web Assembly support!
Data plane getting very interesting…
https://gloo.solo.io

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The service mesh API matters!
Implemented
in code
Out of process
sidecar proxy
Shared gateway
per domain
Single shared
gateway
Control plane
API API API API API

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What do you do with an API?

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Check out our booth for multi-cluster
service mesh management demo.
Idit Levine’s talk today at 2:20p
My KubeCon workshop:
“Service mesh for the developer workflow”
Thursday 2:25p