Microservices what a ServiceMesh

Come to this session to learn about building application platforms that are capable of handling new deployment paradigms such as microservices, fast data, big data, and functions. While these paradigms have offered immense developer velocity and productivity; they often lead to many challenges at runtime from performance and scalability perspectives.

I will demonstrate how complexity of the old monolith has been shifted to a new complexity of a distributed nature. If what use to be an in memory call now is a network hop away to another service, this comes at a cost, but then can the platform be made smarter to handle this? It turns out the answer to this is absolutely yes! The rise of the application platform has given way for other runtime specialized layers to be encoded into the platform to handle network distribution complexities that you don’t have to worry about. For example, if two microservices happen to call each other 99% of the time across the network within one application domain (or multiple domains for that matter), then why do they need to be distributed so far from each other? Why suffer such a latency burden? What if a specialized network layer could detect this and bring the two services really close to each other so that the latency between them is minimal. There are many other patterns I will discuss here, but this essentially gives rise to a specialized layer the industry is calling service mesh. What if I could specify a latency-tolerates limit across a sequence of calls between microservices, and indicate that regardless of what happens I want this layer to guarantee it doesn’t exceed this limit, that would be super cool!

About Emad Benjamin

Emad has spent the past 25 years in various software engineering positions involving software development of application platforms and distributed systems for various industries such as finance, health, IT, and heavy industry – in various international locations. Emad is currently the Sr. Director and Chief Technologist of Application Platforms with Office of the CTO at VMware, focusing on building hybrid cloud distributed runtimes that are application aware.

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