Life Without Sidecars - Is eBPF's Promise Too Good to Be True?

Explore the potential of eBPF in revolutionizing service mesh technology in this 33-minute conference talk by Zahari Dichev from Buoyant. Delve into the promise of eBPF to deliver service mesh benefits with reduced performance and operational costs, and critically examine its ability to replace the sidecar model. Analyze the possibilities and limitations of an eBPF-powered service mesh, discussing its impact on proxies, security, resilience, and operational complexity. Gain insights into the main pillars of service mesh, including control plane and data plane components, request paths, and traditional reverse proxy challenges. Investigate potential use cases such as shared proxies per node or service account, and compare sidecar advantages with popular eBPF folklore. Conclude with a balanced assessment of eBPF's true potential in transforming cloud-native infrastructure.

Intro
Agenda
Main pillars of a service mesh
Control plane
Proxy (Data plane)
Request path
Traditional reverse proxy
Things that are hard
Latency aware load balancing
Identity based policy
Retries
Possible use cases
Shared proxy per node
Shared proxy per service account
Sidecar advantages
Popular folklore
Conclusion