Zero Configuration Service Mesh with On-Demand Cluster Discovery

While Going Through Netflix Technology Blog

?? Exciting Journey: Netflix's Evolution in IPC and Service Mesh ??

?? In 2008, Netflix embarked on its cloud migration journey, fully embracing AWS by 2010. Cloud-native solutions were scarce at that time, so we had to create our own tools. Fast forward to today, where we have a plethora of tools designed for the cloud-native environment.

?? IPC Evolution: Our need for robust Inter-Process Communication (IPC) led to the development of Eureka for Service Discovery and Ribbon (internally known as NIWS) for IPC. Eureka streamlined service discovery, while Ribbon added client-side load balancing and resilience features. These innovations significantly improved our system's reliability.

?? Why Service Mesh: As our business needs expanded, so did the complexity of our IPC ecosystem. We introduced diverse IPC clients, supported multiple languages, and added advanced features. This complexity called for a centralized solution, and that's where service mesh comes into play.

?? Envoy as the Proxy: Envoy emerged as the perfect proxy solution. It's battle-tested, offers crucial resiliency features, and allows dynamic configuration via a central control plane. This means we can achieve the benefits of centralized load balancing without creating a single point of failure.

??? Moving to Mesh: Transitioning to service mesh was a strategic decision, but we had some key constraints. We wanted to preserve our existing interface and make the migration as seamless as possible. To accomplish this, we needed to support Discovery abstractions in Envoy, which led to the creation of On-Demand Cluster Discovery (ODCDS).

?? ODCDS: With ODCDS, proxies can fetch cluster information at runtime, eliminating the need to predefine all clusters. This innovation allows for a smooth migration to service mesh without extensive configuration changes.

?? Seamless Migration: Our transition to service mesh is seamless. We maintain the familiar VIP and SVIP abstractions while configuring IPC clients to connect to the local proxy. Eureka remains the source of truth for VIPs and instance status, accommodating our heterogeneous environment as we migrate.

?? Latency Considerations: While on-demand data fetching introduces slight latency on the first request to a cluster, it's an acceptable trade-off for most scenarios. For low-latency use cases, alternatives like predefined clusters or connection priming are available.

?? Community Collaboration: We're excited about our service mesh journey and look forward to collaborating with the Envoy community on further improvements. We're particularly interested in incremental Endpoint Discovery Service (EDS) to reduce pressure on the control plane and Envoy.

?? Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Kinvolk and the Envoy community for their contributions and support throughout this journey. Together, we're making our system more reliable and resilient.

Stay tuned for more updates on our evolving service mesh adventure! ???? #Netflix #ServiceMesh #CloudNative #Envoy #TechnologyEvolution #digitalmarketing #socialmedia #branding #advertisingandmarketing#strategy#contentmarketing #copywriting #emailmarketing#consumerbehavior#advertising #seo #onlinemarketing #b2bmarketing #blogging #adwords #social #promotion #optimization #marketingagency #marketers #marketingtips