Latency and RAM Usage Comparison of Advanced and Lightweight Service Mesh

The growth of application users in the Industrial revolution 4.0 era is vast. With more application users, more features are required, and the application should be more complex. The more complex an application, the more difficult it is to manage. In the current era, applications with many features no longer use monolithic-based applications because they are challenging to manage. The solution to this is to use microservices. Microservices need a service mesh that helps to connect, secure, control, and monitor microservices. Service mesh addresses the complexities of transitioning from monolithic applications to distributed applications with microservices. Currently, the service mesh that is often used is Istio. Istio is called an advanced service mesh because of its complexity. The solution to this complex problem is Linkerd. Linkerd is called a lightweight service mesh because it is simple and lightweight. Some claim that Linkerd performs better than Istio and uses more efficient resources. This study aims to compare Istio and Linkerd in terms of latency applications microservices. The results show that Linkerd excels in RAM usage efficiency and low latency in application frontend management. However, if you want low latency performance on the application backend, then using Istio will be more appropriate.