Release the Kraken: Bring Sidecar Containers to Next Level

Sidecar containers are well accepted and widely used nowadays. Sidecars are coupled with normal containers by sharing the same lifecycle and provide accessory features. This is a good pattern to enabl …

Sidecar containers are well accepted and widely used nowadays. Sidecars are coupled with normal containers by sharing the same lifecycle and provide accessory features. This is a good pattern to enable applications to be composed of heterogeneous components and technologies by reducing coupling.The demands of using sidecar containers in production environments are rapidly increasing, although sidecars have not formally identified. More issues and discussions have cropped up in Kubernetes community and slack channels.Thus, we need a fine-grained way to manage the sidecars, including the starting/terminating order, the lifecycle of sidecars, etc. Also pre and post steps are introduced to better control the sidecars. Moreover, we will introduce some use scenarios on how we maximize the power of sidecars at a large scale in Alibaba Group and Ant Financial.