Service Mesh: The Sidecar Tax That Eats Your Memory
Service meshes are everywhere. Istio. Linkerd. Consul Connect. Every microservices architecture needs one. Or so the marketing says. But here’s the thing: service meshes add sidecar proxies to every pod. Envoy, Istio’s sidecar, uses 50-200 MB RAM per pod. Linkerd-proxy uses 20-100 MB. Multiply by hundreds of pods. That’s gigabytes of memory just for service mesh overhead. All of this before your applications run. All of this just for inter-service communication. All of this overhead. ...