Umeå University's logo

As microservice-based systems scale across thecloud-edge continuum, traditional centralized scheduling mecha-nisms increasingly struggle with latency, coordination overhead,and fault tolerance. This paper presents a new architectural di-rection: leveraging service mesh sidecar proxies as decentralized,in-situ schedulers to enable scalable, low-latency coordination inlarge-scale, cloud-native environments. We propose embeddinglightweight, autonomous scheduling logic into each sidecar, allow-ing scheduling decisions to be made locally without centralizedcontrol. This approach leverages the growing maturity of servicemesh infrastructures, which support programmable distributedtraffic management. We describe the design of such an archi-tecture and present initial results demonstrating its scalabilitypotential in terms of response time and latency under varyingrequest rates. Rather than delivering a finalized scheduling algo-rithm, this paper presents a system-level architectural directionand preliminary evidence to support its scalability potential.