HybridMesh: A Hardware-software Hybrid Approach for Accelerating Service Mesh Ingress

Service meshes have become essential for enabling microservice communication in cloud environments. Despite their benefits, they impose significant network overhead. We identify that the ingress gateway, the main entry point for external traffic, has emerged as a major performance bottleneck. This overhead stems from two key limitations of current ingress gateways: (1) CPU-intensive traffic analysis and (2) a complex packet forwarding path. Our analysis shows that these inefficiencies can reduce network throughput by up to 4× while substantially increasing CPU utilization. In response, we propose HybridMesh, 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-side proxy that provides various traffic management features not suitable for Smart-NIC execution. Evaluations show that HybridMesh outperforms existing ingress gateways, achieving a 4.4× increase in HTTP throughput. Furthermore, compared to software-only and hardware-only designs, our hybrid design delivers 2.3× higher cost-effectiveness and 2.8× better power-efficiency.