There is a lot of material out there about services meshes, and this is another one. Yay! But why? Because I would like to give you the perspective of someone who wish service meshes did exist 10 years ago, long before the rise of container platforms like Docker and Kubernetes. I’m not claiming that this perspective is better or worse than others, but since service meshes are rather complex beasts, I believe that a multiplicity of points of view can help to understand them better.

I will talk about the dotCloud platform, a platform that was built on 100+ microservices and which supported thousands of production applications running in containers; I will explain the challenges that were faced when building and running it; and how service meshes would (or wouldn’t) have helped.

dotCloud history

I’ve already written about the history of the dotCloud platform and some of its design choices, but I hadn’t talked much about its networking layer. If you don’t want to dive into my previous blog post about dotCloud, all you need to know is that it was a PaaS allowing customers to run a wide range of applications (Java, PHP, Python…) supported by a wide range of data services (MongoDB, MySQL, Redis…) and with a workflow similar to the one of Heroku: you would push your code to the platform, the platform would build container images, and deploy these container images.

I will tell you how traffic was routed on the dotCloud platform; not because it was particularly great or anything (I think it was okay for the time!) but primarily because it’s the kind of design that could be easily implemented with today’s tools by a modest team in a short amount of time, if they needed a way to route traffic between a bunch of microservices or a bunch of applications. So it will give us a good comparison point between “what we’d get if we hacked it ourselves” vs. “what we’d get if we used an existing service mesh”, aka the good old “build vs. buy” quandary.

Traffic routing for hosted applications

Applications deployed on dotCloud could expose HTTP and TCP endpoints.

HTTP endpoints were dynamically added to the configuration of a cluster of Hipache load balancers. This is similar to what we can achieve today with Kubernetes Ingress ressources and a load balancer like Traefik.

Clients could connect to HTTP endpoints using their associated domain names, provided that the domain name would point to dotCloud’s load balancers. Nothing fancy here.

TCP endpoints were associated with a port number, that was then communicated to all the containers of that stack through environment variables.

Clients could connect to TCP endpoints using a specified host name (something like gateway-X.dotcloud.com) and that port number.

That host name would resolve to a cluster of “nats” servers (no relationship whatsoever with NATS) that would route incoming TCP connections to the right container (or, in the case of load-balanced services, to the right containers).

If you’re familiar with Kubernetes, this will probably remind you of NodePort services.

The dotCloud platform didn’t have the equivalent of ClusterIP services: for simplicity, services were accessed the same way from the inside and from the outside of the platform.

This was simple enough that the initial implementations of the HTTP and TCP routing meshes were probably a few hundreds line of Python each, using fairly simple (I’d dare say, naive) algorithms, but evolved over time to handle the growth of the platform and additional requirements.

It didn’t require extensive refactoring of existing application code. Twelve-factor applications in particular could directly use the address information provided through environment variables.

How was it different from a modern service mesh?

Observability was limited. There was no metrics at all for the TCP routing mesh. As for the HTTP routing mesh, later versions provided detailed HTTP metrics, showing error codes and response times; but modern service meshes go above and beyond, and provide integration with metrics collection systems like Prometheus, for instance.

Observability is important not only from an operational perspective (to help us troubleshoot issues), but also to deliver features like safe blue/green deployment or canary deployments.

Routing efficiency was limited as well. In the dotCloud routing mesh, all traffic had to go through a cluster of dedicated routing nodes. This meant potentially crossing a few AZ (availability zones) boundaries, and significantly increasing the latency. I remember troubleshooting issues with some code that was making 100+ SQL requests to display a given page, and opening a new connection to the SQL server for each request. When running locally, the page would load instantly, but when running on dotCloud, it would take a few seconds, because each TCP connection (and subsequent SQL request) would need dozens of milliseconds to complete. In that specific case, using persistent connections did the trick.

Modern service meshes do better than that. First of all, by making sure that connections are routed at the source. The logical flow is still client → mesh → service , but now the mesh runs locally, instead of on remote nodes, so the client → mesh connection is a local one, hence very fast (microseconds instead of milliseconds).

Modern service meshes also implement smarter load-balancing algorithms. By monitoring the health of the backends, they can send more traffic on faster backends, resulting in better overall performance.

Security is also stronger with modern service meshes. The dotCloud routing mesh was running entirely on EC2 Classic, and didn’t encrypt traffic (on the assumption that if somebody manages to sniff network traffic on EC2, you have bigger problems anyway). Modern service meshes can transparently secure all our traffic, for instance with mutual TLS authentication and subsequent encryption.

Traffic routing for platform services

Alright, we’ve discussed how applications communicated, but what about the dotCloud platform itself?

The platform itself was composed of about 100 microservices, responsible for various functions. Some of these services accepted requests from others, and some of them were background workers that would connect to other services, but not receive connections on their own. Either way, each service needed to know the endpoints of addresses it needed to connect to.

A lot of high-level services could use the routing mesh described above. In fact, a good chunk of the 100+ microservices of the dotCloud platform were deployed as normal applications on the dotCloud platform itself. But a small number of low-level services (specifically, the ones implementing that routing mesh) needed something simpler, with less dependencies (since they couldn’t depend on themselves to function; that’s the good old “chicken-and-egg” problem).

These low-level, essential platform services were deployed by starting containers directly on a few key nodes, instead of relying on the platform’s builder, scheduler, and runner services. If you want a comparison with modern container platforms, that would be like starting our control plane with docker run directly on our nodes, instead of having Kubernetes doing it for us. This was fairly similar to the concept of static pods used by kubeadm, or by bootkube when bootstrapping a self-hosted cluster.

These services were exposed in a very simple and crude way: there was a YAML file listing these services, mapping their names to their addresses; and every consumer of these services needed a copy of that YAML file as part of their deployment.

On the one hand, this was extremely robust, because it didn’t involve maintaining an external key/value store like Zookeeper (remember, etcd or Consul didn’t exist at that time). On the other hand, it made it difficult to move services around. Each time a service was moved, all its consumers would need to receive an updated YAML file (and potentially be restarted). Not very convenient!

The solution that we started to implement was to have every consumer connect to a local proxy. Instead of knowing the full address+port of a service, a consumer would only need to know its port number, and connect over localhost . The local proxy would handle that connection, and route it to the actual backend. Now when a backend needs to be moved to another machine, or scaled up or down, instead of updating all its consumers, we only need to update all these local proxies; and we don’t need to restart consumers anymore.

(There were also plans to encapsulate traffic in TLS connections, and have another proxy on the receiving side as well to unwrap TLS and verify certificates, without involving the receiving service, which would be set up to accept connections only on localhost . More on that later.)

This is quite similar to AirBNB’s SmartStack; with the notable difference that SmartStack was implemented and deployed to production, while dotCloud’s new internal routing mesh ended up being shelved when dotCloud pivoted to Docker. ☺

I personally consider SmartStack as one of the precursors of systems like Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect … because all these systems follow that pattern:

run a proxy on each node

consumers connect to the proxy

control plane updates the proxy’s configuration when backends change

… profit!

Implementing a service mesh today

If we had to implement a similar mesh today, we could use similar principles. For instance, we could set up an internal DNS zone, mapping service names to addresses in the 127.0.0.0/8 space. Then run HAProxy on each node of our cluster, accepting connections on each service address (in that 127.0.0.0/8 subnet) and forwarding / load-balancing them to the appropriate backends. HAProxy configuration could be managed by confd, allowing to store backend information in etcd or Consul, and automatically push updated configuration to HAProxy when needed.

This is more or less how Istio works! But with a few differences:

it uses Envoy Proxy instead of HAProxy

it stores backend configuration using the Kubernetes API instead of etcd or Consul

services are allocated addresses in an internal subnet (Kubernetes ClusterIP addresses) instead of 127.0.0.0/8

it has an extra component (Citadel) to add mutual TLS authentication between client and servers

it adds support for new features like circuit breaking, distributed tracing, canary deployments …

Let’s quickly review some of these differences.

Envoy Proxy

Envoy Proxy was written by Lyft. It has many similarities with other proxies (like HAProxy, NGINX, Traefik…) but Lyft wrote it because they needed features that didn’t exist in these other proxies at the time, and it made more sense to build a new proxy than to extend an existing one.

Envoy can be used on its own. If I have a given service that needs to connect to other services, I can set it up to connect to Envoy instead, and then dynamically configure and reconfigure Envoy with the location of my other services, while getting a lot of nifty extra features, for instance in the domain of observability. Instead of using a custom client library, or peppering my code with tracing calls, I direct my traffic to Envoy and let it collect metrics for me.

But Envoy can also be used as the data plane for a service mesh. This means that Envoy will now be configured by the control plane of that service mesh.

Control plane

Speaking of the control plane: Istio relies on the Kubernetes API for that purpose. This is not very different from using confd. Confd relies on etcd or Consul to watch a set of keys in a data store. Istio relies on the Kubernetes API to watch a set of Kubernetes resources.

Aparté: I personally found it really helpful to read this Kubernetes API description that states:

The Kubernetes API server is a “dumb server” which offers storage, versioning, validation, update, and watch semantics on API resources.

End of aparté.

Istio was designed to work with Kubernetes; and if you want to use it outside of Kubernetes, you will need to run an instance of the Kubernetes API server (and a supporting etcd service).

Service addresses

Istio relies on Kubernetes’ allocation of ClusterIP addresses, so Istio services get an internal address (not in the 127.0.0.0/8 range).

On a Kubernetes cluster without Istio, traffic going to the ClusterIP address for a given service is intercepted by kube-proxy, and sent to a backend of that proxy. More specifically, if you like to nail down the technical details: kube-proxy sets up iptables rules (or IPVS load balancers, depending how it was set up) to rewrite the destination IP addresses of connections going the ClusterIP address.

Once Istio is installed on a Kubernetes cluster, nothing changes, until it gets explicitly enabled for a given consumer or even an entire namespace, by injecting a sidecar container into the consumer pods. The sidecar will run an instance of Envoy, and set up a number of iptables rules to intercept traffic going to the other services and redirect that traffic to Envoy.

Combined with Kubernetes DNS integration, this means that our code can connect to a service name, and everything “just works”. In other words, our code would issue a request to e.g. http://api/v1/users/4242, api would resolve to 10.97.105.48 , an iptables rules would intercept connections to 10.97.105.48 and redirect them to the local Envoy proxy, and that local proxy would route the request to the actual API backend. Phew!

Extra bells and whistles

Istio can also provide end-to-end encryption and authentication through mTLS (mutual TLS) with a component named Citadel.

It also features Mixer, a component that Envoy can query for every single request, to make an ad-hoc decision about that request depending on various factors like request headers, backend load… (Don’t worry: there are abundant provisions to make sure that Mixer is highly available, and that even if it breaks, Envoy can continue to proxy traffic.)

And of course, me mentioned observability: Envoy collects a vast amount of metrics, while providing distributed tracing. In a microservices architecture, if a single API request has to go through microservices A, B, C, and D, distributed tracing will add a unique identifier to the request when it enters the system, and preserve that identifier across sub-requests to all these microservices, allowing to gather all related calls, their latencies, etc.

Build vs. buy

Istio has the reputation of being complex. By contrast, building a routing mesh like the one that I described in the beginning of this post is relatively straightforward with the tools that we have today. So, does it make sense to build our own service mesh instead?

If we have modest needs (if we don’t need observability, circuit breaker, and other niceties) we might want to build our own. But if we’re using Kubernetes, we might not even need to, because Kubernetes already provides basic service discovery and load balancing.

Now, if we have advanced requirements, “buying” a service mesh can be a much better option. (It’s not always exactly “buying” since Istio is open source, but we still have to invest engineering time to understand how it works, deploy, and operate it.)

Istio vs. Linkerd vs. Consul Connect

So far, we only spoke about Istio, but it’s not the only service mesh out there. Linkerd is another popular option, and there is also Consul Connect.

Which one should we pick?

Honestly, I don’t konw, and at this point, I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to help anyone make that decision. There are some interesting articles comparing them, and even benchmarks.

One approach that has a lot of potential is to use a tool like SuperGloo. SuperGloo offers an abstraction layer to simplify and unify the APIs exposed by service meshes. Instead of learning about the specific (and, in my opinion, relatively complex) APIs of various service meshes, we can use the simpler constructs offered by SuperGloo, and switch seamlessly from one service mesh to another. A little bit as if we had an intermediary configuration format describing HTTP frontends and backends, and able to generate actual configuration for NGINX, HAProxy, Traefik, Apache …

I’ve dabbled a bit in Istio using SuperGloo, and in a future blog post, I would like to illustrate how to add Istio or Linkerd to an existing cluster using SuperGloo, and whether the latter holds its promise, i.e. allowing me to switch from one routing mesh to another without rewriting configurations.

If you enjoyed that post and would like me to try out some specific scenarios, I’d love to hear from you!