The maintainers of Linkerd announced the results of the latest benchmark analysis of service mesh performance. These
tests, designed to measure mesh performance under real-world conditions, showed
that Linkerd consumed an order of magnitude less memory and CPU and introduced
up to 400% less latency than Istio at scale.
"My team and I first
deployed Istio because it seemed like the popular option, but we found it hard
to use, resource-heavy, and too complex," said Chris Campbell, cloud
platform architect, HP. "In contrast, Linkerd worked right out of the box,
consumed a fraction of the system resources and had an understandable
architecture. These test results are not surprising -Linkerd makes it obvious
to adopt service mesh and delivers the best performance."
The benchmarks evaluated the
latest versions of Linkerd and Istio and reported the relative costs of each
mesh against the baseline condition of no service mesh. These costs included
both the CPU and memory consumed by the mesh as well as the user-facing latency
the meshes introduced.
At the highest traffic level
measured, the benchmarks showed:
- Latency:Istio
introduced 36% more additional median latency and 438% more additional maximum
latency than Linkerd.
- Control plane:Istio's control plane required 2.5x the memory and over 50x the CPU
that Linkerd's control plane required.
- Data plane:Istio's Envoy proxies consumed 8x the memory and 8x the CPU that
Linkerd's Rust-based proxies did.
"The data plane is the
most critical part of the service mesh. This is the part of the mesh that
scales out, and also the part that imposes a user-facing latency cost," said William
Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and one of the creators of Linkerd. "The tremendous
difference in performance and resource cost between Linkerd and Istio largely
comes down to Linkerd's Rust-based 'micro-proxy' implementation on the
data plane. These micro-proxies not only make Linkerd significantly easier to
operate than Envoy-based service meshes like Istio, they enable it to deliver
tremendous gains in efficiency and performance. These numbers speak for
themselves."
The benchmark tests followed
a 2019 analysis performed by Kinvolk which showed a
similar performance gap between the meshes. Today's tests use the same Kinvolk
benchmark suite with latest stable releases of both projects (Linkerd 2.10.2
and Istio 1.10.0) and run on a CNCF Kubernetes cluster provided by Equinix Metal. While the 2019 Kinvolk tests evaluated
performance at 500 requests per second (RPS) and 600 RPS, these tests evaluate
the service meshes at over three times the scale at 2,000 RPS. (The full
discussion of experimental methodology and results are available in the
project's blog post about the benchmarks.)
Linkerd's focus on
performance, security, and simplicity has led to a 300% increase in downloads
over the past year. Linkerd's adopters range from innovative startups to large
international enterprises and include Microsoft, H-E-B, EverQuote, HP,
the Nordic electronics retailer Elkjøp, and Entain, the global
sports betting and gaming operator, which recently reported reducing server load by over 50% while increasing request volume by 10x with
Linkerd. Linkerd was recently recognized as the Best Open Source DevOps Tool of 2020 by the Tech
Ascension Awards for its ability to address core challenges faced by engineers
building and operating modern applications.
What end users have to say
about Linkerd
"Like many
organizations, we considered Istio. But our research led to the conclusion that
we would need a team of developers just to run it. It was too complicated,
requiring ongoing, active attention-it's not fire and forget. We looked at
other solutions and ended up with a shortlist of half a dozen different
options, but the one that stood out was Linkerd." -- Steve Reardon, DevOps Engineer, Entain
"We've felt encumbered
by [Istio's] complexity every time when configuring, maintaining or
troubleshooting in our clusters. Our suspicions were that since we hardly used
any of the capabilities, we could probably make do with a much simpler
alternative. So, after yet another 'Oh... This problem was caused by
Istio!'-moment, we decided the time was ripe to consider the
alternatives." - Frode Sundby, Senior Engineer at NAV