Data Processing Unit (DPU) Based Network Process Offloading for Efficient Service Meshes

As the software development landscape transitions from monolithic applications to agile, cloud-native microservices, new challenges in communication have emerged, necessitating the evolution of network service meshes to effectively manage these complexities. While addressing these communication challenges, implementing service mesh solutions introduces higher resource utilization, primarily due to deploying an additional per-microservice infrastructure known as the “sidecar” container. A sidecarless approach, as exemplified by Cilium, leverages extended Berkeley packet filter (eBPF) technology to minimize operational overhead and optimize resource utilization. The advent of data processing units (DPU) represents a crucial evolution in cloud accelerators, designed to offload and accelerate networking, security, and storage tasks traditionally handled by server CPUs. This demonstration integrates DPU technology with Cilium’s sidecarless architecture and proposes to offload Cilium’s control plane to DPUs. Our proposed approach improves system efficiency by deploying Cilium’s control plane components on DPUs in a separate host mode. Further, our approach conserves CPU cycles on the primary hosts and shifts network processing tasks to the DPU. This strategic offload aims to enhance throughput, reduce latency, and unburden CPUs from network processing tasks to improve the performance of service mesh architectures for cloud-native ecosystems.