Dissecting Overheads of Service Mesh Sidecars

Service meshes play a central role in the modern application ecosystem by providing an easy and flexible way to connect microservices of a distributed application. However, because of how they interpose on application traffic, they can substantially increase application latency and its resource consumption. We develop a tool called MeshInsight to help developers quantify the overhead of service meshes in deployment scenarios of interest and make informed trade-offs about their functionality vs. overhead. Using MeshInsight, we confirm that service meshes can have high overhead-up to 269% higher latency and up to 163% more virtual CPU cores for our benchmark applications-but the severity is intimately tied to how they are configured and the application workload. IPC (inter-process communication) and socket writes dominate when the service mesh operates as a TCP proxy, but protocol parsing dominates when it operates as an HTTP proxy. MeshInsight also enables us to study the end-to-end impact of optimizations to service meshes. We show that not all seemingly-promising optimizations lead to a notable overhead reduction in realistic settings.