The Future of Service Meshes: Sidecarless or eBPF?
summary
Compares sidecar-based meshes to an Ambient Mesh that moves proxies to the node via a Rust Z tunnel plus optional Waypoint for L7, and shows eBPF acceleration (Cilium) for socket-to-socket forwarding. Reports a benchmark reducing total CPU from ~3.1 to 0.3 vCPU and cutting 21 pod sidecars to three node proxies. Demonstrates node-level mTLS with HBone overlay, mixed sidecar fallback for intra-node mTLS, and live auth policy enforcement working end to end.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:07What is a service mesh
- 6:26Sidecar-based mesh
- 10:40eBPF for networking
- 14:38Sidecarless ambient mesh
- 17:09Ambient mesh performance
- 18:59Security in ambient mesh
- 21:49Cilium eBPF mesh
- 24:19Live demo
- 28:58Future of service meshes
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