eZtunnel: Leveraging eBPF to Transparently Offload Service Mesh Data Plane Networking

Cloud-native applications, characterized by scalability, resilience, and flexibility, adopt microservices architectures to decompose applications into smaller, independently manageable services. Although microservices offer significant benefits, this architectural approach introduces challenges in service-to-service communication, commonly relying on advanced orchestration and communication frameworks such as Kubernetes and Istio, respectively. However, the added complexity imposes substantial overhead by introducing longer packet processing paths. This paper discusses performance bottlenecks arising from service meshes and proposes eZtunnel to address some of the identified challenges. Leveraging extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to transparently offload networking traffic, the elongated network path is bypassed, optimizing resource utilization and enhancing application performance. Experiments show that eZtunnel can reduce median latency over 20% and jitter to almost 10%.