Understanding Sidecars in Cloud Orchestration

Sidecars are used by organizations to implement advanced operational and security features in cloud environments. Since sidecars interpose on network traffic to provide these functionalities, they can degrade critical service level metrics such as latency and throughput. However, the precise impact of sidecars on such key metrics remains unclear. Our evaluation quantifies service-layer overheads as well as the micro-architectural implications of using sidecars in orchestration platforms - and evaluate these overheads across a range of sidecar configurations.