Implementing Consul Service Mesh

Walk through the journey of implementing a service mesh including features, advantages, complexities/customizations, challenges and best practices.

Following is the template of the talk:

Service Mesh Implementation Journey:
1) Set up overview
a) A bit about Egnyte infra for which we are implementing Service Mesh. We have some very high traffic apps(1m req/s and upto 200k qps)
b) Talk a bit about Consul @ Egnyte. Egnyte has apps both on VMs and K8s which we unifying in a single Service Mesh
c) Touch upon the advantages that we are gaining from Consul Service Mesh

2) Talk about how we set it up:
a) We have servers on the VM side with k8s connecting to it
b) We are using Centos 7 for our VM infra and the last available envoy package for the same is 1.18. So we had to compile custom higher versions for envoy. Centos 7 has some limitations in building envoy.
c) Configured hot restart for envoys on VM to allow for connection draining
d) Tuning timeouts
e) Go over the testing we followed for Service Mesh
f) Walk through the performance tests that we did
g) Discuss how we plan to do a slow roll out with fail over support

3) Look at the customizations we did for some of our requirements, like:
a) Graceful handling of the sidecar lifecycle(https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-k.... Temporary custom patch till the solution is available in Consul
b) Using escape hatch overrides
c) Disable circuit breakers since they are too tight by default in envoy. We already have our own circuit breakers so this is anyways not required

4) Go over logging, monitoring and alerting:
a) Monitoring is done via Prometheus using Consul SD
b) monitoring dashboards overview
c) alerting overview
b) Config automation is done to ensure any newly added service are by default automatically configured for logging, monitoring and alerting

5) Talk a bit about infra as code:
a) Discuss how we have configured flags for switching on / off sidecars
b) Separate flags to route traffic via sidecars

6) Go over POC we did for Canary & Blue Green deployments

Speaker: Narendra Patel
Twitter:   / narendrapateljc  

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