Modern service mesh deployments are equipped with hundreds of tunables, such as timeouts and circuit breakers. Finding ideal initial values requires deep technical expertise. Workloads change over time, requiring regular effort to re-tune stale parameters. As a consequence, configuration errors have become a source of operational toil and one of the major causes of system failures across the industry. The service mesh should aim to expose a minimal configuration surface by dynamically adjusting parameters based on observations.

Tony Allen will provide a deep-dive into how Envoy’s Adaptive Concurrency Control feature dynamically tunes circuit breaker thresholds using real-time sampling of request latencies, removing the need for periodic adjustment. He will also discuss lessons learned deploying the feature to Lyft’s production service mesh.