Service Mesh and eBPF-Powered Microservices: A Survey and Future Directions

Modern software development practice has seen a profound shift in architectural design, moving from monolithic approaches to distributed, microservice-based architectures. This allows for much simpler and faster application orchestration and management, especially in cloud-based systems, with the result being that orchestration systems themselves are becoming a key focus of computing research.Orchestration system research addresses many different subject areas, including scheduling, automation, and security. However, the key characteristic that is common throughout is the complex and dynamic nature of distributed, multi-tenant cloud-based microservice systems that must be orchestrated. This complexity has led to many challenges in areas such as inter-service communication, observability, reliability, single cluster to multi-cluster, hybrid environments, and multi-tenancy.The concept of service meshes has been introduced to handle this complexity. In essence, a service mesh is an infrastructure layer built directly into the microservices - or the nodes of orchestrators - as a set of configurable proxies that are responsible for the management, observability, and security of microservices.Service meshes aim to be a full networking solution for microservices; however, they also introduce overhead into a system - this can be significant for low-powered edge devices, as service mesh proxies work in user space and are responsible for processing the incoming and outgoing traffic of each service. To mitigate performance issues caused by these proxies, the industry is pushing the boundaries of monitoring and security to kernel space by employing eBPF for faster and more efficient responses.We propose that the movement towards the use of service meshes as a networking solution for most of the required features by industry - combined with their integration with eBPF - is the next key trend in the evolution of microservices. This paper highlights the challenges of this movement, explores its current state, and discusses future opportunities in the context of microservices.