- Containers need to scale to handle increased traffic and prevent downtime, which can cost companies millions per minute of outage. - Traditional approaches like reverse proxies have limitations for scaling microservices and APIs across cloud environments. - A service mesh provides a reliable method for scaling through a network of sidecar proxies that implement features like HTTP routing, retries, circuit breakers, and health monitoring. - This approach assumes underlying network protocols are unreliable and implements its own routing and reliability to avoid failures in the infrastructure layers.

1. SO YOU THINK YOU CAN
S C A L E@F5Networks containers?

2. ☺  
Why do we scale?

3. =

4. 100 Milliseconds Slower
-1% SALES -0.2% SEARCHES -2% CONVERSION
$660M $45M $244M
H/T James Urquhart, SOASTA Data: Gartner, Walmart

5. 1 Minute of Downtime
Data: Emerson Power
Costs an average of $7300
Average total cost of downtime per year across industries
PRODUCTIVITY IT PRODUCTIVITY LOST REVENUE
$53,608$140,543 $183,724

6. UP OUT
How do we scale today?

7. But architectures and apps are changing
THEN
MONOLITHIC MICROSERVICES & APIs
NOW

8. And so are environments
THEN NOW
DATA CENTERS & SERVERS CLOUDS & CONTAINERS

9. COMMS INCREASES EXPONENTIALLY
THEN NOW

10. SMALLER CAPACITY MEANS MORE CLONES
THEN NOW

11. RAPID CHANGES MAKE SCALING HARD
NOWTWO MINUTES AGO

12. REVERSE
PROXY
THEN NOW

13. FORWARD PROXY
• NATIVE CONSTRUCT
• BASED ON IP TABLES
• LIMITED to IP:PORT

14. REVERSE PROXY
• EPHEMERAL CONSTRUCT
• BASED ON IP TABLES
• LIMITED to IP:PORT

15. SIDECAR PROXY
• PLUG-IN CONSTRUCT
• FORWARD PROXY
• L7 CAPABLE

16. LAYER 1
LAYER 2
LAYER 3 (IP)
LAYER 4 (TCP)
LAYER 5
LAYER 6
LAYER 7 (HTTP)
LAYER 7.5 (TAGS)
LAYER 4.5 (MESH)
LAYER 2.5 (OVERLAY - VXLAN)
TRADITIONAL OSI STACK
Assumes underlying
protocols behave
consistently and
reliably. Relies on
proper adherence to
and reliability of lower
order protocols.
CONTAINER OVERLAY STACK
Assumes underlying protocols exist but are
unreliable. Implements its own routing and
reliability constructs to avoid failure of and
reliance on lower order protocols.
BUILDING A SERVICE MESH

17. A SERVICE MESH
Circuit breakers
Auto-Retries
A network of sidecar proxies that form a reliable method of scale that includes:
Health monitoring
HTTP Routing

18. HTTP ROUTING
Like Google maps, but for your apps
URI &
method
host
custom
Cookie
GET /path/to/my/service/with/variables
http://host.domain.xxx
request
headers
X-API-version: 1
Cookie: 09124890tlsgkq3i3KJSDLFJ)*@$#()
You encrypt your cookies, right? RIGHT?!

19. RETRIES
DO OVER! • CONGESTION
• CAPACITY
• FAILURE
• REJECTION
☺ 

20. CIRCUIT BREAKERS
STOP TRYING ALREADY

21. MONITORING
IF I’M NOT HOME, DO YOU STILL DRIVE TO MY HOUSE?
Service is unavailable
Service is slow
Service is returning errors

22. SCALING CONTAINERS
SMARTER and FASTER : SERVICE MESH
Must be L7 (HTTP) fluent
Delegate instead of dictate
Monitoring is not optional
Collaborative not constant

23. THANK YOU!
@F5Networks