Episode 136 - Sidecar Proxy (Pros and Cons)

A sidecar proxy is an application design pattern which abstracts certain networking features, such as inter-service communications, monitoring and security, timeouts, retries, communication protocols, away from the main architecture to ease the maintenance of the application as a whole.

In this video I’d like to talk about how we classically do things:

• Library Pattern
  • getComments HTTP1:1/JSON
  • Add features retries/timeout /hardcode the server name what it changed/add new server to load balance between them/credentials
• Sidecar pattern
  • getComments HTTP/2
• Sidecar proxy/container

Examples

• Microservices (Linkerd, Envoy, Istio)

Pros

• Language agnostic (polyglot)
• Protocol upgrade
• Security
• Tracing and Monitoring
• Service Discovery
• Caching

Cons

• Complexity
• Latency
• SideCar Proxy must be layer 7

Library 2:25

Sidecar: 7:40

Example: 13:00 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp3Ku1XeOn8)

Pros & Cons : 16:15

Cards

6:22 HTTP/2

10;50 Reverse Proxy / proxy

example 13:00 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp3Ku1XeOn8)

16:00 Layer 4 vs Layer 7 load balancer