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Steering Committee members (September 29, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/steering-election-results/>2020 Steering Committee Election Results</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The effect of security policies on latency of requests (September 15, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/>Large Scale Security Policy Performance Tests</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new deployment model for Istio (August 27, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/new-deployment-model/>Deploying Istio Control Planes Outside the Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The Istio Steering Committee is now in part proportionally allocated to companies based on contribution, and in part elected by community members (August 24, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/steering-changes/>Introducing the new Istio steering committee</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An alternative sidecar proxy for Istio (July 28, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/mosn-proxy/>Using MOSN with Istio: an alternative data plane</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An update on trademarks and project governance (July 8, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/open-usage/>Open and neutral: transferring our trademarks to the Open Usage Commons</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new way to manage installation of telemetry addons (June 4, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/addon-rework/>Reworking our Addon Integrations</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describing the new functionality of Workload Entries (May 21, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/workload-entry/>Introducing Workload Entries</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Simplifying Istio upgrades by offering safe canary deployments of the control plane (May 19, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/multiple-control-planes/>Safely Upgrade Istio using a Canary Control Plane Deployment</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Application Load Balancer to direct 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for Envoy and Istio declaratively (March 16, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/deploy-wasm-declarative/>Declarative WebAssembly deployment for Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The future of Istio extensibility using WASM (March 5, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>Redefining extensibility in proxies - introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A vision statement and roadmap for Istio in 2020 (March 3, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/>Istio in 2020 - Following the Trade Winds</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage secrets (February 20, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/istio-agent/>Remove cross-pod unix domain sockets</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automating Istio configuration for Istio deployments (clusters) that work as a single mesh (January 5, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/multi-cluster-mesh-automation/>Multicluster Istio configuration and service discovery using Admiral</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card1 title="Blog posts for 2019." aria-controls=card1-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2019 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card1 role=region id=card1-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card1><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage Istio webhooks (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/webhook/>Secure Webhook Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Analyze your Istio configuration to detect potential issues and get general insights (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/introducing-istioctl-analyze/>Introducing istioctl analyze</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction to Istio's new operator-based installation and control plane management feature (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/introducing-istio-operator/>Introducing the Istio Operator</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/v1beta1-authorization-policy/>Introducing the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Getting programmatic access to Istio resources (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/announcing-istio-client-go/>Announcing Istio client-go</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provision and manage DNS certificates in Istio (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/dns-cert/>DNS Certificate Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure Istio ingress gateway to act as a proxy for external services (October 15, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/proxy/>Istio as a Proxy for External Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Deploy environments that require isolation into separate meshes and enable inter-mesh communication by mesh federation (October 2, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/isolated-clusters/>Multi-Mesh Deployments for Isolation and Boundary Protection</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How can you use Istio to monitor blocked and passthrough external traffic (September 28, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/monitoring-external-service-traffic/>Monitoring Blocked and Passthrough External Service Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Demonstrates a Mixer out-of-process adapter which implements the Knative scale-from-zero logic (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/knative-activator-adapter/>Mixer Adapter for Knative</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to secure multi-cloud Kubernetes applications with zero code changes (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/app-identity-and-access-adapter/>App Identity and Access Adapter</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Taking advantage of Kubernetes trustworthy JWTs to issue certificates for workload instances more securely (September 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/trustworthy-jwt-sds/>Change in Secret Discovery Service in Istio 1.3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The design principles behind Istio's APIs and how those APIs are evolving (August 5, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/evolving-istios-apis/>The Evolution of Istio's APIs</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Comparison of alternative solutions to control egress traffic including performance considerations (July 22, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-3/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Use Istio Egress Traffic Control to prevent attacks involving egress traffic (July 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-2/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 2</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Tools and guidance for evaluating Istio's data plane performance (July 9, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/performance-best-practices/>Best Practices: Benchmarking Service Mesh Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Learn how to extend the lifetime of Istio self-signed root certificate (June 7, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/root-transition/>Extending Istio Self-Signed Root Certificate Lifetime</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Attacks involving egress traffic and requirements for egress traffic control (May 22, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-1/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 1</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An overview of Istio 1.1 performance (March 19, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/istio1.1_perf/>Architecting Istio 1.1 for Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Istio route rules in a multicluster service mesh (February 7, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/multicluster-version-routing/>Version Routing in a Multicluster Service Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Announces the new Istio blog policy (February 5, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/sail-the-blog/>Sail the Blog!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Verifies the performance impact of adding an egress gateway (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-performance/>Egress Gateway Performance Investigation</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="De-mystify how Istio manages to plugin its data-plane components into an existing deployment (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/data-plane-setup/>Demystifying Istio's Sidecar Injection Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Addressing application startup ordering and startup latency using AppSwitch (January 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/appswitch/>Sidestepping Dependency Ordering with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio has a new discussion board (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/announcing-discuss.istio.io/>Announcing discuss.istio.io</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to deploy a custom ingress gateway using cert-manager manually (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/custom-ingress-gateway/>Deploy a Custom Ingress Gateway Using Cert-Manager</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card2 title="Blog posts for 2018." aria-controls=card2-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2018 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card2 role=region id=card2-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card2><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to use Istio for traffic management without deploying sidecar proxies (November 21, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/incremental-traffic-management/>Incremental Istio Part 1, Traffic Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (November 16, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-mongo/>Consuming External MongoDB Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio hosting an all day Twitch stream to celebrate the 1.0 release (August 3, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/istio-twitch-stream/>All Day Istio Twitch Stream</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How HP is building its next-generation footwear personalization platform on Istio (July 31, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/hp/>Istio a Game Changer for HP's FitStation Platform</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automatic application onboarding and latency optimizations using AppSwitch (July 30, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/delayering-istio/>Delayering Istio with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describe Istio's authorization feature and how to use it in various use cases (July 20, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/istio-authorization/>Micro-Segmentation with Istio Authorization</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to export Istio Access Logs to different sinks like BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver (July 9, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/export-logs-through-stackdriver/>Exporting Logs to BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio for monitoring and access policies of HTTP egress traffic (June 22, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-monitoring-access-control/>Monitoring and Access Policies for HTTP Egress Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1alpha3 routing API (April 25, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/v1alpha3-routing/>Introducing the Istio v1alpha3 routing API</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio ingress with a network load balancer on AWS (April 20, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/aws-nlb/>Configuring Istio Ingress with AWS NLB</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Kubernetes namespaces and RBAC to create an Istio soft multi-tenancy environment (April 19, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/soft-multitenancy/>Istio Soft Multi-Tenancy Support</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An introduction to safer, lower-risk deployments and release to production (February 8, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/traffic-mirroring/>Traffic Mirroring with Istio for Testing in Production</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (February 6, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-tcp/>Consuming External TCP Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (January 31, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-https/>Consuming External Web Services</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card3 title="Blog posts for 2017." aria-controls=card3-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2017 Posts</button><div class="body default" aria-labelledby=card3 role=region id=card3-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card3><li role=none><span role=treeitem class=current title="Improving availability and reducing latency (December 7, 2017)">Mixer and the SPOF Myth</span></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provides an overview of Mixer's plug-in architecture (November 3, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/adapter-model/>Mixer Adapter Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How Kubernetes Network Policy relates to Istio policy (August 10, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/0.1-using-network-policy/>Using Network Policy with Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to create autoscaled canary deployments (June 14, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/0.1-canary/>Canary Deployments using Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio Authentication 0.1 announcement (May 25, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/0.1-auth/>Using Istio to Improve End-to-End Security</a></li></ul></div></div></div></nav></div><div class=article-container><button tabindex=-1 id=sidebar-toggler title="Toggle the navigation bar"><svg class="icon pull"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#pull"/></svg></button><nav aria-label=Breadcrumb><ol><li><a href=/v1.8/ title="Connect, secure, control, and observe services.">Istio</a></li><li><a href=/v1.8/blog/ title="Posts about using Istio.">Blog</a></li><li><a href=/v1.8/blog/2017/ title="Blog posts for 2017.">2017 Posts</a></li><li>Mixer and the SPOF Myth</li></ol></nav><article aria-labelledby=title><div class=title-area><div style=width:100%><h1 id=title>Mixer and the SPOF Myth</h1><p class=subtitle>Improving availability and reducing latency</p><p class=byline><span>By</span>
<span class=attribution>Martin Taillefer</span><span> | </span><span><svg class="icon calendar"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#calendar"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>December 7, 2017</span><span> | </span><span title="1297 words"><svg class="icon clock"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#clock"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>7 minute read</span>
<span>&nbsp;</span>
<span></span></p></div></div><nav class=toc-inlined aria-label="Table of Contents"><div><hr><ol><li role=none aria-label="How we got here"><a href=#how-we-got-here>How we got here</a><li role=none aria-label="Architecture recap"><a href=#architecture-recap>Architecture recap</a><li role=none aria-label="Mixer: SLO booster"><a href=#mixer-slo-booster>Mixer: SLO booster</a><li role=none aria-label="Mixer: Latency slasher"><a href=#mixer-latency-slasher>Mixer: Latency slasher</a><li role=none aria-label="Work ahead"><a href=#work-ahead>Work ahead</a><ol><li role=none aria-label="Configuration canaries"><a href=#configuration-canaries>Configuration canaries</a><li role=none aria-label="Cache tuning"><a href=#cache-tuning>Cache tuning</a><li role=none aria-label="Cache sharing"><a href=#cache-sharing>Cache sharing</a><li role=none aria-label=Sharding><a href=#sharding>Sharding</a></ol></li><li role=none aria-label=Conclusion><a href=#conclusion>Conclusion</a><li role=none aria-label="See also"><a href=#see-also>See also</a></li></ol><hr></div></nav><div><aside class="callout warning"><div class=type><svg class="large-icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#callout-warning"/></svg></div><div class=content>This blog post was written assuming Istio 0.3, so some of this content may now be outdated.</div></aside></div><p>As <a href=https://istio.io/v1.6/docs/reference/config/policy-and-telemetry/>Mixer</a> is in the request path, it is natural to question how it impacts
overall system availability and latency. A common refrain we hear when people first glance at Istio architecture diagrams is
&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t this just introducing a single point of failure?&rdquo;</p><p>In this post, we’ll dig deeper and cover the design principles that underpin Mixer and the surprising fact Mixer actually
increases overall mesh availability and reduces average request latency.</p><p>Istio&rsquo;s use of Mixer has two main benefits in terms of overall system availability and latency:</p><ul><li><p><strong>Increased SLO</strong>. Mixer insulates proxies and services from infrastructure backend failures, enabling higher effective mesh availability. The mesh as a whole tends to experience a lower rate of failure when interacting with the infrastructure backends than if Mixer were not present.</p></li><li><p><strong>Reduced Latency</strong>. Through aggressive use of shared multi-level caches and sharding, Mixer reduces average observed latencies across the mesh.</p></li></ul><p>We&rsquo;ll explain this in more detail below.</p><h2 id=how-we-got-here>How we got here</h2><p>For many years at Google, we’ve been using an internal API & service management system to handle the many APIs exposed by Google. This system has been fronting the world’s biggest services (Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, etc) and sustains a peak rate of hundreds of millions of QPS. Although this system has served us well, it had problems keeping up with Google’s rapid growth, and it became clear that a new architecture was needed in order to tamp down ballooning operational costs.</p><p>In 2014, we started an initiative to create a replacement architecture that would scale better. The result has proven extremely successful and has been gradually deployed throughout Google, saving in the process millions of dollars a month in ops costs.</p><p>The older system was built around a centralized fleet of fairly heavy proxies into which all incoming traffic would flow, before being forwarded to the services where the real work was done. The newer architecture jettisons the shared proxy design and instead consists of a very lean and efficient distributed sidecar proxy sitting next to service instances, along with a shared fleet of sharded control plane intermediaries:</p><figure style=width:75%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:74.79295535770372%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/mixer-spof-myth-1.svg title="Google System Topology"><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.8/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/mixer-spof-myth-1.svg alt="Google System Topology"></a></div><figcaption>Google's API & Service Management System</figcaption></figure><p>Look familiar? Of course: it’s just like Istio! Istio was conceived as a second generation of this distributed proxy architecture. We took the core lessons from this internal system, generalized many of the concepts by working with our partners, and created Istio.</p><h2 id=architecture-recap>Architecture recap</h2><p>As shown in the diagram below, Mixer sits between the mesh and the infrastructure backends that support it:</p><figure style=width:75%><div class=wrapper-with-intrinsic-ratio style=padding-bottom:65.89948886170049%><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/mixer-spof-myth-2.svg title="Istio Topology"><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.8/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/mixer-spof-myth-2.svg alt="Istio Topology"></a></div><figcaption>Istio Topology</figcaption></figure><p>The Envoy sidecar logically calls Mixer before each request to perform precondition checks, and after each request to report telemetry.
The sidecar has local caching such that a relatively large percentage of precondition checks can be performed from cache. Additionally, the
sidecar buffers outgoing telemetry such that it only actually needs to call Mixer once for every several thousands requests. Whereas precondition
checks are synchronous to request processing, telemetry reports are done asynchronously with a fire-and-forget pattern.</p><p>At a high level, Mixer provides:</p><ul><li><p><strong>Backend Abstraction</strong>. Mixer insulates the Istio components and services within the mesh from the implementation details of individual infrastructure backends.</p></li><li><p><strong>Intermediation</strong>. Mixer allows operators to have fine-grained control over all interactions between the mesh and the infrastructure backends.</p></li></ul><p>However, even beyond these purely functional aspects, Mixer has other characteristics that provide the system with additional benefits.</p><h2 id=mixer-slo-booster>Mixer: SLO booster</h2><p>Contrary to the claim that Mixer is a SPOF and can therefore lead to mesh outages, we believe it in fact improves the effective availability of a mesh. How can that be? There are three basic characteristics at play:</p><ul><li><p><strong>Statelessness</strong>. Mixer is stateless in that it doesn’t manage any persistent storage of its own.</p></li><li><p><strong>Hardening</strong>. Mixer proper is designed to be a highly reliable component. The design intent is to achieve > 99.999% uptime for any individual Mixer instance.</p></li><li><p><strong>Caching and Buffering</strong>. Mixer is designed to accumulate a large amount of transient ephemeral state.</p></li></ul><p>The sidecar proxies that sit next to each service instance in the mesh must necessarily be frugal in terms of memory consumption, which constrains the possible amount of local caching and buffering. Mixer, however, lives independently and can use considerably larger caches and output buffers. Mixer thus acts as a highly-scaled and highly-available second-level cache for the sidecars.</p><p>Mixer’s expected availability is considerably higher than most infrastructure backends (those often have availability of perhaps 99.9%). Its local caches and buffers help mask infrastructure backend failures by being able to continue operating even when a backend has become unresponsive.</p><h2 id=mixer-latency-slasher>Mixer: Latency slasher</h2><p>As we explained above, the Istio sidecars generally have fairly effective first-level caching. They can serve the majority of their traffic from cache. Mixer provides a much greater shared pool of second-level cache, which helps Mixer contribute to a lower average per-request latency.</p><p>While it’s busy cutting down latency, Mixer is also inherently cutting down the number of calls your mesh makes to infrastructure backends. Depending on how you’re paying for these backends, this might end up saving you some cash by cutting down the effective QPS to the backends.</p><h2 id=work-ahead>Work ahead</h2><p>We have opportunities ahead to continue improving the system in many ways.</p><h3 id=configuration-canaries>Configuration canaries</h3><p>Mixer is highly scaled so it is generally resistant to individual instance failures. However, Mixer is still susceptible to cascading
failures in the case when a poison configuration is deployed which causes all Mixer instances to crash basically at the same time
(yeah, that would be a bad day). To prevent this from happening, configuration changes can be canaried to a small set of Mixer instances,
and then more broadly rolled out.</p><p>Mixer doesn’t yet do canarying of configuration changes, but we expect this to come online as part of Istio’s ongoing work on reliable
configuration distribution.</p><h3 id=cache-tuning>Cache tuning</h3><p>We have yet to fine-tune the sizes of the sidecar and Mixer caches. This work will focus on achieving the highest performance possible using the least amount of resources.</p><h3 id=cache-sharing>Cache sharing</h3><p>At the moment, each Mixer instance operates independently of all other instances. A request handled by one Mixer instance will not leverage data cached in a different instance. We will eventually experiment with a distributed cache such as memcached or Redis in order to provide a much larger mesh-wide shared cache, and further reduce the number of calls to infrastructure backends.</p><h3 id=sharding>Sharding</h3><p>In very large meshes, the load on Mixer can be great. There can be a large number of Mixer instances, each straining to keep caches primed to
satisfy incoming traffic. We expect to eventually introduce intelligent sharding such that Mixer instances become slightly specialized in
handling particular data streams in order to increase the likelihood of cache hits. In other words, sharding helps improve cache
efficiency by routing related traffic to the same Mixer instance over time, rather than randomly dispatching to
any available Mixer instance.</p><h2 id=conclusion>Conclusion</h2><p>Practical experience at Google showed that the model of a slim sidecar proxy and a large shared caching control plane intermediary hits a sweet
spot, delivering excellent perceived availability and latency. We’ve taken the lessons learned there and applied them to create more sophisticated and
effective caching, prefetching, and buffering strategies in Istio. We’ve also optimized the communication protocols to reduce overhead when a cache miss does occur.</p><p>Mixer is still young. As of Istio 0.3, we haven’t really done significant performance work within Mixer itself. This means when a request misses the sidecar
cache, we spend more time in Mixer to respond to requests than we should. We’re doing a lot of work to improve this in coming months to reduce the overhead
that Mixer imparts in the synchronous precondition check case.</p><p>We hope this post makes you appreciate the inherent benefits that Mixer brings to Istio.
Don’t hesitate to post comments or questions to <a href=https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/istio-policies-and-telemetry>istio-policies-and-telemetry@</a>.</p><nav id=see-also><h2>See also</h2><div class=see-also><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2017/adapter-model/>Mixer Adapter Model</a></p><p class=desc>Provides an overview of Mixer's plug-in architecture.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/docs/concepts/observability/>Observability</a></p><p class=desc>Describes the telemetry and monitoring features provided by Istio.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/addon-rework/>Reworking our Addon Integrations</a></p><p class=desc>A new way to manage installation of telemetry addons.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2019/app-identity-and-access-adapter/>App Identity and Access Adapter</a></p><p class=desc>Using Istio to secure multi-cloud Kubernetes applications with zero code changes.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2019/knative-activator-adapter/>Mixer Adapter for Knative</a></p><p class=desc>Demonstrates a Mixer out-of-process adapter which implements the Knative scale-from-zero logic.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/docs/tasks/observability/metrics/classify-metrics/>Classifying Metrics Based on Request or Response (Experimental)</a></p><p class=desc>This task shows you how to improve telemetry by grouping requests and responses by their type.</p></div></div></nav></article><nav class=pagenav><div class=left></div><div class=right><a title="Provides an overview of Mixer's plug-in architecture." href=/v1.8/blog/2017/adapter-model/>Mixer Adapter Model<svg class="icon right-arrow"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#right-arrow"/></svg></a></div></nav><div id=feedback><div id=feedback-initial>Was this information useful?<br><button class="btn feedback" onclick="sendFeedback('en',1)">Yes</button>
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