Invited Paper: Towards Efficient Microservice Communication
Divyanshu Saxena, William Zhang, Madhav Tummala, Saksham Goel, Aditya Akella · 2023
Distributed applications on the cloud are being developed and deployed as microservices as opposed to the monolithic architecture. Service Meshes have emerged as a way of specifying communication policies between microservices. Service Meshes have the potential to abstract the networking requirements of distributed applications from the application logic. However, current service mesh frameworks introduce significant performance and resource overheads. We study the overheads of service meshes and make a case for redesigning both the control plane and data plane for service meshes. First, we propose the notion of Application Defined Middleboxes, which makes it possible for the mesh control planes to reduce the overheads by optimizing where to implement application policies. Second, we demonstrate preliminary ideas on accelerating the data plane to further reduce the overheads.