Solving the Service Mesh Adopter's Dilemma

Lee Calcote

Lee Calcote

linkedin.com/in/leecalcote

@lcalcote

gingergeek.com

lee@calcotestudios.com

cloud native and its management

calcotestudios.com/talks

github.com/leecalcote

Service Mesh Patterns

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What is a Service Mesh?

a dedicated layer for managing service-to-service communication

So, a microservices platform?

obviously.

partially.

a services-first network

@layer5

Reviews v1

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Reviews v3

Product Pod

Details Container

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Ratings Container

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Product Container

Reviews Service

Ratings Service

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Product Service

BookInfo Sample App

@layer5

BookInfo Sample App on Service Mesh

Reviews v1

Reviews Pod

Reviews v2

Reviews v3

Product Pod

Details Container

Details Pod

Ratings Container

Ratings Pod

Product Container

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Envoy sidecar

Reviews Service

Enovy sidecar

Envoy ingress

Product Service

Ratings Service

Details Service

@layer5

“Linkerd is shifting the developer mind to focus on the business logic and not on some technicality. It just makes it easier and faster to deploy and develop, and you have a safety net.”

@layer5

Case Studies

Autotrader UK

Source

Autotrader UK adopted Istio and:

  • Reduced deployment time by almost 97%, from 10 minutes to 20 seconds.
     
  • Avoided a six-month engineering effort for a more secure infrastructure.
     
  • 75% more efficient CPU and RAM allocation through greater oversight of applications.

Apester adopted Linkerd and:

  • Shortened Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) by a factor of 2
     
  • Processing 20 billion requests per month with no timeouts.
     

  • No outages for 6 months and counting

Apester

Source

Observability

what gets people hooked on service metrics

Goals

  • Metrics without instrumenting apps

  • Consistent metrics across fleet

  • Trace flow of requests across services

  • Portable across metric back-end providers

You get a metric!  You get a metric!  Everyone gets a metric!

@layer5

Traffic Control

control over chaos

  • Traffic splitting
    • L7 tag based routing?
  • Traffic steering
    • Look at the contents of a request and route it to a specific set of instances.
  • Ingress and egress routing

Resilency

 

  • Systematic fault injection

  • Timeouts and Retries with timeout budget

  • Control connection pool size and request load

  • Circuit breakers and Health checks

 

content-based traffic steering

Missing: application lifecycle management, but not by much

Missing: distributed debugging; provide nascent visibility (topology)

@layer5

Why use a Service Mesh?

to avoid...

  • Bloated service (application) code

  • Duplicating work to make services production-ready

    • Load balancing, auto scaling, rate limiting, traffic routing...

  • Inconsistency across services

    • Retry, tls, failover, deadlines, cancellation, etc., for each language, framework

    • Siloed implementations lead to fragmented, non-uniform policy application and difficult debugging

  • Diffusing responsibility of service management

@layer5

Help with Modernization

@lcalcote

 

  • Can modernize your IT inventory without:

    • Rewriting your applications

    • Adopting microservices, regular services are fine

    • Adopting new frameworks

    • Moving to the cloud

address the long-tail of IT services

Get there for free

Developer Velocity
(aka speed)

Development Process

Application Architecture

Deployment and Packaging

Application Infrastructure

Agile

Waterfall

DevOps

N-Tier

Monolithic

Microservices

Cloud

Containers

Physical Servers

Virtual Servers

Data Center

Hosted

Evolution to Cloud Native

λ

Functions

Serverless

Events

SRE

(Unikernels)

@layer5

Service Meshes

Stacking up Service Mesh

analogous to the serverless value prop

...but for long-lived services (much the world's workloads)

IaaS

CaaS

PaaS

SaaS

Service Mesh

  • Short-lived

  • Event-driven

  • Long-lived

  • Process-driven

  • Always hot

FaaS

@layer5

@layer5

Third step in Cloud Native journey

Meshery is interoperable with each abstraction.

Container

Orchestrator

Mesh

5.5 years
(Jun 2014)

4.5 years
(Jul 2015)

3 years
(Apr 2017)

5.5 years ago
(Jun 2014)

7 years ago
(Mar 2013)

4 years ago
(Feb 2016)

v1.0

Announced

DEV

OPS

Decoupling at Layer 5

where Dev and Ops meet

Problem: too much infrastructure code in services

@layer5

Service Mesh Architectures

Service Mesh Architecture

Data Plane

  • Touches every packet/request in the system.

  • Responsible for service discovery, health checking, routing, load balancing, authentication, authorization, and observability.

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

@layer5

Service Mesh Architecture

No control plane? Not a service mesh.

Control Plane

  • Provides policy, configuration, and platform integration.

  • Takes a set of isolated stateless sidecar proxies and turns them into a service mesh.

  • Does not touch any packets/requests in the data path.

Data Plane

  • Touches every packet/request in the system.

  • Responsible for service discovery, health checking, routing, load balancing, authentication, authorization, and observability.

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

@layer5

Service Mesh Architecture

Control Plane

Data Plane

  • Touches every packet/request in the system.

  • Responsible for service discovery, health checking, routing, load balancing, authentication, authorization, and observability.

  • Provides policy, configuration, and platform integration.

  • Takes a set of isolated stateless sidecar proxies and turns them into a service mesh.

  • Does not touch any packets/requests in the data path.

You need a management plane.

Ingress Gateway

Management
Plane

  • Provides monitoring, backend system integration, expanded policy and application configuration.

Egress Gateway

@layer5

Pilot

Citadel

Mixer

Control Plane

Data Plane

istio-system namespace

policy check

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

tls certs

discovery & config

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

telemetry

 

reports

Control flow

application traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

telemetry reports

Istio Architecture

Galley

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

@layer5

Control Plane

Data Plane

octa-system namespace

policy check

Foo Pod

Proxy
Sidecar

Service Foo

discovery & config

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

telemetry

 

reports

Control flow

application traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

telemetry reports

Octarine Architecture

Policy
Engine

Security Engine

Visibility
Engine

+

Proxy
Sidecar

+

@layer5

Control Plane

Data Plane

linkerd-system namespace

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

telemetry

 

scarping

Control flow during request processing

application traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

telemetry scraping

Architecture

destination

Prometheus

Grafana

tap

web

CLI

proxy-api

public-api

Linkerd

proxy-injector

@layer5

@layer5

layer5.io/landscape

It's meshy out there.

@layer5

Service mesh abstractions to the rescue

Meshery is interoperable with each abstraction.

Service Mesh Interface

(SMI)

Multi-Vendor Service Mesh Interoperation (Hamlet)

Service Mesh Performance Specification (SMPS)

A standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes.

A set of API standards for enabling service mesh federation.

A format for describing and capturing service mesh performance.

Adopter’s Dilemma

Which service mesh to use?

What's the catch? Nothing's for free.

Lifecycle Management

WHICH SERVICE MESH SHOULD I USE AND HOW DO I GET STARTED?

 

Performance Benchmark

WHAT OVERHEAD DOES BEING ON THE SERVICE MESH INCUR?

 

https://meshery.io

@layer5

Core Infrastructure
Initative

Service Mesh Interface (SMI)

Configuration

Security

Telemetry

Control Plane

Data
Plane

service mesh ns

Foo Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Foo

Foo Container

Bar Pod

Proxy Sidecar

Service Bar

Bar Container

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Control flow

application

traffic

Application traffic

application namespace

Meshery Architecture

Ingress Gateway

Egress Gateway

Management
Plane

meshery

adapter

gRPC

kube-api

kube-system

@layer5

generated load

http / gRPC traffic

@layer5

Configuration Best Practices

Meshery analyzes your service mesh and workload configuration

OPERATE WITH CONFIDENCE

Assess your service mesh configuration against deployment and operational best practices with Meshery's configuration validator.

Contrasting Performance

meshery.io

Deploy Management Plane

Management
Plane

Provides expanded governance, backend system integration, multi-mesh, federation, expanded policy, and dynamic application and mesh configuration.

Control Plane

Data Plane

brew tap layer5io/tap
brew install mesheryctl
mesheryctl start

Install Meshery

@lcalcote

Using brew

Using bash

curl -L https://git.io/meshery | sudo bash -  
kubectl config view --minify --flatten > config_minikube.yaml

If using minikube:

Lee Calcote

cloud native and its management

@lcalcote

calcotestudios.com/talks

linkedin.com/in/leecalcote

Join Slack http://slack.layer5.io

Service Mesh Deployment Models

Client

Edge Cache

Istio Gateway

(envoy)

Cache Generator

Collection of VMs running APIs

service mesh

Istio VirtualService

Istio VirtualService

Istio ServiceEntry

Situation:

  • existing services running on VMs (that have little to no service-to-service traffic).

  • nearly all traffic flows from client to the service and back to client.

 

Benefits:

  • gain granular traffic control (e.g path rewrites).

  • detailed service monitoring without immediately deploying a thousand sidecars.

Ingress

Istio - The Weather Company's Journey

Out-of-band telemetry propagation

Application traffic

@lcalcote

Control flow

Proxy per Node

Service A

Service A

Service A

linkerd

Node (server)

Service A

Service A

Service B

linkerd

Node (server)

Service A

Service A

Service C

linkerd

Node (server)

Advantages:

  • Less (memory) overhead.

  • Simpler distribution of configuration information.

  • primarily physical or virtual server based; good for large monolithic applications.
     

Disadvantages:

  • Coarse support for encryption of service-to-service communication, instead host-to-host encryption and authentication policies.

  • Blast radius of a proxy failure includes all applications on the node, which is essentially equivalent to losing the node itself.

  • Not a transparent entity, services must be aware of its existence.

layer5.io/books

Advantages:

  • Good starting point for building a brand-new microservices architecture or for migrating from a monolith.

Disadvantages:

  • When the number of services increase, it becomes difficult to manage.

Router "Mesh"

Fabric Model

Advantages:

  • Granular encryption of service-to-service communication.

  • Can be gradually added to an existing cluster without central coordination.

Disadvantages:

  • Lack of central coordination. Difficult to scale operationally.

Ingress or Edge Proxy

Advantages:

  • Works with existing services that can be broken down over time.

Disadvantages:

  • Is missing the benefits of service-to-service visibility and control.