Canal Mesh: A Cloud-Scale Sidecar-Free Multi-Tenant Service Mesh Architecture

Abstract

In recent years, service mesh frameworks have gained significant popularity in building microservice-based applications. A key component of these frameworks is a proxy in each K8s pod, named sidecar, which handles inter-pod traffic. Our empirical measurement reveals that such per-pod sidecars cause numerous problems, including intrusion into the user pod, excessive resource occupation, significant overhead in managing many sidecars, and performance degradation caused by passing traffic through the sidecar.