Service Mesh Performance (SMP) is a vendor-neutral specification to standardize service mesh value meausurement.
The Service Mesh Performance Working Group is hosted within CNCF SIG Network. All are welcome to participate. This group is defining the Service Mesh Performance (SMP). Using SMP, MeshMark provides a universal performance index to gauge your mesh’s efficiency against deployments in other organizations’ environments.
SMP is a collaborative effort of Layer5, UT Austin, Google, and The Linux Foundation.
The group is also working in collaboration with the Envoy project to create easy-to-use tooling around distributed performance management (distributed load generation and analysis) in context of Istio, Consul, Tanzu Service Mesh, Network Service Mesh, App Mesh, Linkerd, and so on.
Learn more about the cost of a service mesh
Participate in the CNCF Service Mesh Performance Working Group
Discreetly Studying the Effects of Individual Traffic Control Functions
KubeCon EU 2020 - Lee Calcote & Prateek Sahu
Performance of Envoy Filters
The following analysis compares native Envoy filter performance to WebAssembly (WASM) filter performance using Rust.
Native WASM at Capacity:
When every request goes via the
rate-limit check and then the actual program logic, we see that
the latency incurred for the WASM code is higher than the Native
client. This is expected since the native client has processing
for rate-limiting locally in a process whereas the rust module
is invoked as an additional thread to do the processing and the
communication involved with the module incurs an overhead. This
is prominent in the minimum response time case which represents
latency just due to rate-limiting logic where every other part
of the request is already "warm". As we move towards average
latency, the overhead gets slightly amortized but is still above
the native rate-limiting case. Our max latency is slightly lower
than native, but we attribute it to various other system effects
like TLS handshake and network latencies that usually contribute
to the maximum tail latency.
Latency at scale:
When we go beyond the
application capacity (100 in our example), we start noticing the
power of a in-line ight wasm module which starts terminating
requests at the side-car and the core application logic is never
invoked/loaded. We notice that even the minimum response time
for a terminated request is about 15-20% faster than invoking of
application logic since the wasm is a dynamic module in the
sidecar and we start to avoid complex network redirection and
invocation of a new container/instance. We also notice that the
average latency of requests is lower than in the case of native
client.
Client Capacity:
Client Capacity figure also shows us that we are able to handle
more requests than in the native case, although this infometric
needs to be taken with a grain of salt, i.e. the difference
might reduce if our application capacity was significantly
larger than 100.