from Hacker News

Envoy Proxy Performance on Kubernetes

by kelseyevans on 10/3/19, 3:49 PM with 14 comments

  • by nickvanw on 10/3/19, 6:05 PM

    This is somewhat valuable, but misses any investigation as to why there were outlying latency spikes when using non-Envoy software for load balancing. Furthermore, using the average latency like this doesn't tell us much, especially with outliers making the graphs worthless for steady-state performance analysis.

    My first thought is that the spikes are somewhat clearly the result of requests getting sent to pods that no longer exist, or are starting and not prepared to process requests. This might just speak to the method of configuration for all three of these underlying softwares and say absolutely nothing about how well they actually fare doing any load balancing.

    If someone came to me with this at work, I would say it is the beginning of a series of troubleshooting steps to answer the question of why there are such outlying requests when using our load balancer of choice, and not an analysis of which software to pick.

    Edit: Even worse is that this appears to be from a company that sells.. an API gateway built on top of Envoy.

  • by rumanator on 10/3/19, 5:18 PM

    The article focus on latency spikes, which happen only sporadically. Can anyone more knowledgeable on the subject chime in and comment if this comparison is fair or relevant? Personally I was expecting to see histograms or empirical distribution functions of each service's latency.

  • by jwkane on 10/3/19, 11:33 PM

    Nginx-ingress (the free version) does a reload when pods are added/removed. I would expect to see latency spikes. As I understand it the paid nginx-ingress can do these reconfigs on-the-fly. If you have pods adding/removing frequently, like maybe from "We then scale up the backend service to four pods and then scale it back down to three pods every thirty seconds", this is what you see. The more interesting question is if that is a realistic expectation for your workload. Unless you are doing aggressive auto-scaling pods can be very stable, only add/removing during upgrades.

  • by bradwood on 10/3/19, 7:26 PM

    traefik?