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Revolutionizing Sidecarless Service Mesh with eBPF and Remote Gateway (Kmesh)#

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 (London) digest Program Core pick London · 1–4 April 2025

Zhonghu Xu, Huawei — Core

  • Why: Concrete performance numbers for the sidecarless-mesh direction discussed above — a specific implementation (Kmesh) claiming a 90% resource-consumption reduction versus sidecar-based meshes while staying Istio-API-compatible.
  • What: A demo of Kmesh, an eBPF-based sidecarless service mesh combining an L4 eBPF acceleration layer with an L7 control plane via remote waypoint proxies, claiming full Istio API compatibility. (from abstract only)
  • How: eBPF hooks handle L4 traffic redirection and kernel-space connection management directly; L7 features (canary, traffic splitting, fault injection) are handled by a decoupled remote waypoint gateway rather than a per-pod sidecar proxy. (from abstract only)
  • Where applicable: Istio-API-compatible deployments looking to cut sidecar resource overhead; vendor-reported numbers (90% resource reduction, 10x CPU improvement) should be treated as claims to verify against your own workload, not assumed universal.