Project: Service Mesh Performance (Orchestration & Management / Service Mesh)
File: 2020-12-02-kubecon+cloudnativecon-service-mesh-battle-stories-and-fixes.md

slug: KubeCon+CloudNativeCon subtitle: Service Mesh Battle Stories and Fixes image: /assets/img/service-mesh-implementations.png alt: KubeCon+CloudNativeCon date: 2020-12-02 06:00:00 +0000 category: spec author: The Newsroom layout: post caption: title: KubeCon+CloudNativeCon subtitle: Service Mesh Battle Stories and Fixes thumbnail: /assets/img/service-mesh-implementations.png <div style="text-align:center;margin-bottom:2rem;"> <img src="/assets/img/service-mesh-implementations.png" alt="service-mesh-implementations" width="100%" /> </div> As more organizations implement service meshes, they are finding what works and what needs more work, and they are creating new management practices around this knowledge. A few tried-and-tested best practices were detailed last month during KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. Theres a lot to say about each of these service meshes and how they work: their architecture, why theyre made, what theyre focused on, what they do when they came about and why some of them arent here anymore and why were still seeing new ones, Lee Calcote, founder of Layer5, explained during his talk with Kush Trivedi, a Layer5 maintainer, entitled Service Mesh Specifications and Why They Matter in Your Deployment. Service mesh is increasingly seen as a requirement to manage microservices in Kubernetes environments, offering a central control plane to manage microservices access, testing, metrics and other functionalities. One-third of the respondents in The New Stack survey of our readers said their organizations already use service mesh. Among the numerous service mesh options available; Envoy, Istio, Linkerd and Kuma are but a few on offer. Organizations will likely look to use at least more than one API service layer and service mesh for their clusters. This is why interoperability, and thus specifications, are critical for control planes as well. During his talk Service Mesh Specifications and Why They Matter in Your Deployment mentioned above for example, Calcote, asked rhetorically: How many specifications, how many standards are there that have come to the rescue, so to speak, for understanding and interoperating with the various service meshes that are out there? Calcote said. <img src="/assets/img/service-mesh-abstractions.png" alt="service-mesh-abstractions" width="100%" /> A service mesh can be used for testing router performance, service latency and other variables. However, determining service mesh performance in an apples-to-apples way can be challenging. When studying published results from some of the service meshes [from providers] that do publish results about performance what youll find is that theyre probably using an environment that isnt necessarily like yours, Calcote said. Theyre also using different statistics and metrics to measure [their service meshes] and it doesnt help. <img src="/assets/img/service-mesh-performance.png" alt="service-mesh-performance" width="100%" /> Service mesh performance (SMP) was created in an attempt to establish a way of comparing the performance of different services. The SMP was born in combination with engaging with a few of those different service mesh maintainers and creating a standard way of articulating a performance of a mesh, Calcote said. Among the variables in consideration, in addition to the service mesh itself, include the number of clusters, workloads, the types of nodes, control plan configuration and the use of client libraries all affect performance. What costs more, whats more efficient and whats more powerful: These are all open questions that SMP assists in answering in your environment, Calcote said. Read the full, . {% include related-discussion.html tag="SMP"%}