Service invocation performance

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2021-08-18 16:30:27

This article provides service invocation API performance benchmarks and resource utilization for the components needed to run Dapr in different hosting environments.

Dapr consists of a data plane, the sidecar that runs next to your app, and a control plane that configures the sidecars and provides capabilities such as cert and identity management.

The service invocation API is a reverse proxy with built-in service discovery to connect to other services. This includes tracing, metrics, mTLS for in-transit encryption of traffic, together with resiliency in the form of retries for network partitions and connection errors.

Using service invocation you can call from HTTP to HTTP, HTTP to gRPC, gRPC to HTTP, and gRPC to gRPC. Dapr does not use HTTP for the communication between sidecars, always using gRPC, while carrying over the semantics of the protocol used when called from the app. Service invocation is the underlying mechanism of communicating with Dapr Actors.

The test was conducted on a 3 node Kubernetes cluster, using commodity hardware running 4 cores and 8GB of RAM, without any network acceleration. The setup included a load tester (Fortio) pod with a Dapr sidecar injected into it that called the service invocation API to reach a pod on a different node.

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