“What is the performance impact that a service mesh has?"

"What overhead does being on the mesh incur?”

By far, this is the most common questioned by engineers coming to with the value of functionality provided by a service mesh. Generally, this question goes unanswered.

We will share methodology and results of performance testing research done in collaboration with a university, through the lens an open source service mesh benchmark tool - a tool used to provide a common benchmark across service meshes (their control planes, like Istio) and modern proxies (their data planes, like Envoy).

Over 10 service meshes projects will be reviewed. In addition to performance, we’ll take an in-depth look at the landscape of service meshes, characterize and contrast their functionality as well as their data plane and control plane architectures.