eBPF or Not, Sidecars are the Future of the Service Mesh
William Morgan William is the co-founder and CEO of Buoyant, the creator of the open source service mesh projects Linkerd. Prior to Buoyant, he was an infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he helped move Twitter from a failing monolithic Ruby on Rails app to a highly distributed, fault-tolerant microservice architecture. He was a software engineer at Powerset, Microsoft, and Adap.tv, a research scientist at MITRE, and holds an MS in computer science from Stanford University. eBPF is a hot topic in the Kubernetes world, and the idea of using it to build a “sidecar-free service mesh” has generated recent buzz. Proponents of this idea claim that eBPF lets them reduce service mesh complexity by removing sidecars. What’s left unsaid is that this model simply replaces sidecar proxies with multitenant per-host proxies — a significant step backward for both security and operability that increases, not decreases, complexity. The sidecar model represents a tremendous advancement for the industry. Sidecars allow the dynamic injection of functionality into the application at runtime, while — critically — retaining all the isolation guarantees achieved by containers. Moving from sidecars back to multitenant, shared proxies loses this critical isolation and results in significant regressions in security Continue reading