An Evaluation of Service Mesh Frameworks for Edge Systems

Service Mesh Technologies (SMTs) are increasingly popular in simplifying the networking between microservices. They allow one to declaratively and programmatically define service-to-service policies and interactions, and take all sorts of network management logic (e.g., traffic splitting, request tracing, security, reliability) out of the application. This simplifies the development of microservice architectures, which are widely used in cloud and edge applications. However, the suitability for different SMTs for use in edge applications is unclear. Thus, this work compares the two most popular SMTs (Istio and Linkerd) in terms of performance and overhead for resource-constrained devices. Through extensive experimentation and comparing with a baseline of standard networking in a Kubernetes cluster, we identify that Linkerd offers a more edge-friendly SMT option in contrast to Istio. Overall, Istio's communications are similar to 10% slower than Linkerd at an increased 1.2-1.4x more memory and similar to 1.2x more CPU utilization.