Modern application architecture is shifting from monolith to microservices: componentized, containerized, and orchestrated with systems like Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm. While this environment is resilient to many failures of both hardware and software, applications require more than this to be truly resilient. In this talk, we introduce the notion of a "service mesh": a userspace infrastructure layer designed to manage service-to-service communication in microservice applications, including handling partial failures and unexpected load, while reducing tail latencies and degrading gracefully in the presence of component failure.

1. The Service Mesh
Kevin Lingerfelt, @klingerf, kl@buoyant.io

3. resilience
The property of a material that enables it to resume its
original shape after being bent, stretched, or compressed.

4. operational stress
variable load
hardware failure
bugs
the unexpected
resilient strategies
dynamic orchestration
load balancing
timeouts & retries
circuit breaking

5. 2000
dedicated hardware with
configuration management
dynamically scheduled
hybrid cloud
2017

6. containers
orchestrators
microservices

7. service
A
service
B
service
C
runtime communication

8. service
A
service
B
service
C
Twitter circa 2013

9. complexity: timeouts & retries
timeout=400ms
retries=3
timeout=400ms
retries=2
timeout=200ms
retries=3
timelines
users
web
db
800ms!
600ms!

10. cloud native abstractions
Virtual machines
Data centers
Hardware redundancy
Servers
IP addresses, DNS
Server monitoring
Monolithic applications
TCP/IP
Containers
Orchestrated envs
Design for failure
Services
Service discovery
Service monitoring
Microservices
gRPC, REST

11. service
A
service
B
service
C
we need something more
?

12. the service mesh
an infrastructure layer for managing service to service communication

13. Apache Apache Apache
PHP PHP PHP PHP PHP
Mysql Mysql Mysql
LAMP

14. Nginx Nginx Nginx
DB DB DB
Fat clients
svc svc svcsvc svc
svc svc svcsvc svc svc
libraries

15. Nginx Nginx Nginx
DB DB DB
The service mesh
svc svc svcsvc svc
svc svc svcsvc svc svc
service mesh
service mesh

16. The Linkerd service mesh
Service C
Service B
Service A
linkerd
Service C
Service B
Service A
linkerd
Service C
Service B
Service A
linkerd
application HTTP
proxied HTTP
monitoring&control
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3
Service C
Service B
Service A
linkerd
application HTTP
proxied HTTP
monitoring&control
Node 1

17. visibility security flexibilityreliability

18. If you’re building a cloud native application,
you need a service mesh.
CENSORED

19. linkerd.io