Benchmarking Journey Through Service Meshes

Service meshes have become an essential part of cloud-native infrastructures around the world, managing secure, reliable communication between services serving healthcare systems, financial data, real-time analytics platforms, and global e-commerce applications. But not all service meshes are created equal, and as service meshes promise low latency, minimal overhead, and robust reliability, are these claims always true to their word?

Benchmarking service meshes like Linkerd, Istio, and others can reveal key differences between them due to the impact of technological and design choices. But creating fair, reproducible benchmarks requires careful setup and a deep understanding of both the workloads and the mesh technologies themselves.

In his Linkerd Day talk, Linkerd Ambassador Dominik Táskai dives into the art and science of benchmarking service meshes. We’ll uncover insights into what makes a service mesh fast, lightweight, and production-ready and whether the promises that each makes really hold up.