US Patent 10986150 Load balancing in a dynamic scalable services mesh

The disclosed technology teaches distributed routing and load balancing in a dynamic service chain: receiving and processing a packet, with added header including stream affinity code, at a first service instance and based on processing determining a second service, among available services, that should next handle the packet. The technology teaches accessing a flow table using the stream affinity code in the header to select a service instance performing the second service in the service chain, and routing the packet to the second service instance upon egress from the first service instance. When the flow table lacks an entry for the second service corresponding to the stream affinity code, the disclosed technology teaches accessing a consistent hash table of service instances performing the second service, selecting an available instance, and updating the flow table to specify the second service instance as providing the second service for packets sharing the header.