Smart Routing at Scale: How Spotify’s XDS Control Plane Cut 75%... Yannick Epstein & Anya Hristova

This talk discusses Spotify's innovative approach to smart routing at scale, focusing on how the company cut cross-zone traffic by 75% using its extended xDS control plane. The speakers, Yannick Epstein and Anya Hristova, explain the challenges of running workloads across multiple availability zones and the limitations of historical client-side routing. They detail how Spotify implemented dynamic, data-driven zone-aware routing across a proxyless service mesh involving two million nodes, leveraging Envoy's routing principles with real-time load telemetry. This optimization achieved significant cost reduction while maintaining system reliability, demonstrating principles applicable to any large-scale service mesh aiming for cost efficiency and high availability.