A Qualitative Evaluation of Service Mesh-based Traffic Management for Mobile Edge Cloud

TL;DR

This paper qualitatively evaluates the suitability of current service mesh architectures for traffic management in mobile edge cloud environments, highlighting their limitations for performance-demanding workloads and suggesting directions for improvement.

Contribution

It provides a systematic analysis revealing that existing dependability-centric service meshes are inadequate for mobile edge cloud workloads, motivating new research directions.

Findings

Current service meshes fail to meet performance demands of mobile edge workloads.

Dependability-centric designs lack sufficient QoS guarantees for edge environments.

Need for performance-efficient architectures and higher abstraction levels.

Abstract

Service mesh is getting widely adopted as the cloud-native mechanism for traffic management in microservice-based applications, in particular for generic IT workloads hosted in more centralized cloud environments. Performance-demanding applications continue to drive the decentralization of modern application execution environments, as in the case of mobile edge cloud. This paper presents a systematic and qualitative analysis of state-of-the-art service mesh to evaluate how suitable its design is for addressing the traffic management needs of performance-demanding application workloads hosted in a mobile edge cloud environment. With this analysis, we argue that today's dependability-centric service mesh design fails at addressing the needs of the different types of emerging mobile edge cloud workloads and motivate further research in the directions of performance-efficient architectures, stronger QoS guarantees and higher complexity abstractions of cloud-native traffic management frameworks.