HardMesh: Enabling High-performance Service Mesh Ingress Processing with SmartNICs

Service meshes have become essential for enabling microservices in cloud environments; however, they also introduce substantial network overhead. In particular, the ingress gateway, which serves as the primary entry point for external traffic, has emerged as a major performance bottleneck due to CPU-intensive traffic analysis and prolonged forwarding paths through multiple network stack layers. Our analysis indicates that these inefficiencies can result in a 4-fold reduction in network throughput and increased CPU resource consumption. In response, we propose HardMesh, a hardware-software hybrid ingress gateway that leverages a SmartNIC for high-performance traffic analysis and efficient traffic routing. This process is augmented by a lightweight CPU-based proxy for traffic management. Evaluations show that HardMesh outperforms existing ingress gateways, achieving up to 4.4× higher throughput while providing the same range of traffic management services.