The Service Mesh

You’re using Docker. You’re on Kubernetes. You’re building microservices. And now you’re fully ready to scale to arbitrary workloads and gracefully handle partial failures. Or are you? In this talk, former Twitter engineer Oliver Gould describes a critical component of every cloud native application: the “service mesh” that defines how services communicate with each other, shed load, and propagate failure. He traces the lineage of the service mesh from client-specific implementations, to libraries like Finagle, Hysterix, and Stubby, to modern proxy-based incarnations like Linkerd. If you’re writing cloud native applications today, the service mesh is a critical part of ensuring that they can be fast, scalable, and reliable.

Transcript

1. The Service Mesh Oliver Gould @olix0r, CTO, Buoyant
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 svc svc svc svc svc svc svc svc svc libraries
15. Nginx Nginx Nginx DB DB DB The service mesh svc svc svc svc svc svc svc svc svc 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 flexibility reliability
18. If you’re building a cloud native application,
 you need a service mesh. CENSORED
19. linkerd.io
20. The service mesh at GlueCon Small, Fast, Memory Safe Network Proxies: Rust Meets the Linkerd Service Mesh
 - Carl Lerche (Buoyant), Breakout #3 at 11 today
 
 Linkerd booth Istio: A Holistic Approach to Managing Service-Mesh Traffic on Kubernetes 
 - Louis Ryan (Google) & Shiriram Rajagopalan (IBM)