A Brief overview of the Sidecar Container Pattern

Working, advantages & disadvantages of the sidecar container

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Introduction

In the past decade, tech companies have widely adopted microservices architecture. The adoption has dramatically improved the availability and reliability of the services. Containerization has further speeded up the development process and reduced the operational burden on developers.

It’s a challenging task to build distributed systems. Developers have identified a standard set of problems that repeat while building these systems. This led to the emergence of reusable and modular architectural patterns. These patterns are similar to the design patterns in object-oriented programming.

Architectural patterns help us to avoid reinventing the wheel during the development process. The practices act as abstractions and can be reused by any service.

In this article, we will understand one of the architectural patterns known as the Sidecar. We will understand the problem that this pattern tries to solve. Later, we will explore the working and the tradeoffs of this pattern.

Problem

In one of my previous companies, the architecture constituted a set of legacy services that used HTTPfor…