Istio API Gateway Impact to Reduce Microservice Latency and Resource Usage on Kubernetes
Laurentius Nathaniel, Gilang Virga Perdana, Mochamad Rafli Hadiana, Ridha Muldina Negara, Sofia Naning Hertiana · 2023
The rapid development of technology has caused a massive demand for technology applications. Infrastructure plays a vital role in application performance, and unreliable infrastructure can hinder application performance, resulting in a poor customer experience. One of the core components that enables application accessibility is the proxy server, which routes incoming traffic to the application that executing business logic. The proxy server runs in the Kubernetes environment in the abstraction of operating system virtualization. As the gateway to applications running in the Kubernetes environment, a gateway server with excellent performance, reliability, and efficient resource utilization is required. The selection of the proxy server as the gateway to the backend application significantly impacts application performance from the user’s perspective. The experiment conducted in this research is to test the backend application accessed through two different proxy servers in the Kubernetes environment. This research compares the response time and hardware resource utilization of the proxy server application, representing common microservice architecture and mesh microservice. This paper proposed the modern microservice architecture and evaluate the performance of common microservice paradigm so enterprise application with high request rate can serve client with lowest latency and efficient resource. The results shows that the Istio ingress proxy is suitable for microservice applications with high request rates while nginx ingress proxy performs better when serving lower request.