Leveraging Service Meshes for Accelerating Serverless Workflows

Explore how service meshes can be leveraged to accelerate serverless workflows in this 22-minute conference talk from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021. Dive into the challenges of function composition in serverless platforms and learn about innovative approaches to reduce function interaction overhead. Discover the potential of co-locating multiple functions within a single container and implementing custom local messaging mechanisms. Examine the complexities of partitioning functions across containers and the need for efficient load balancing. Investigate how service meshes can be extended to become co-location aware and provide a unified data plane for both intra- and inter-container messaging. Gain insights from real-world implementation experiences, including advantages and potential pitfalls of this approach. Explore topics such as Knative Eventing, Knative Serving, KNIX Microfunctions, and strategies for handling different data sizes in serverless workflows.

Intro
Serverless Workflows
Platform design
Basic Services
Knative Serving
Knative Eventing Sequence
Eventing + Serving
Different data sizes
Summary
Outline
Overheads in transferring large data
Need for internal load rebalance
Load rebalancing with data transfer
Dynamically configurable communication
KNIX Microfunctions (knix.io) • Colocate functions of a workflow inside single container wrapped in a native service Provides custom local message bus within the container
Source code