Leveraging Service Meshes as a New Network Layer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

As modern cloud services have scaled out, applications have moved from relatively monolithic designs to highly modularized fleets of microservices that communicate among each other to perform application-level tasks. These microservices effectively form a network at the application layer, and service mesh frameworks have recently emerged to factor out microservices' common communication functionality. This paper seeks to highlight the emergence of service meshes as what is effectively a new layer in the networking stack, and the associated new challenges and opportunities. As a case study, we leverage the fact that service meshes can be better informed about application needs, and design a system that utilizes provenance tracing within the service mesh to perform cross-layer prioritization of latency-sensitive requests, within an application serving a mix of workloads. Broadly speaking, we believe that as applications factor out communication into service meshes, an exciting new domain is opening that can utilize techniques from the networking community to improve application performance.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationHotNets 2021 - Proceedings of the 20th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages229-236
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781450390873
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 10 2021
Event20th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets 2021 - Virtual, Online, United Kingdom
Duration: Nov 10 2021Nov 12 2021

Publication series

NameHotNets 2021 - Proceedings of the 20th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks

Conference

Conference20th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, HotNets 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/10/2111/12/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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