/aeraki

Manage any layer-7 protocols in a Service Mesh.

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Aeraki

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Manage any layer-7 traffic in a service mesh!

Aeraki [Air-rah-ki] is the Greek word for 'breeze'. While service mesh becomes an important infrastructure for microservices, many(if not all) service mesh implementations mainly focus on HTTP protocols and treat other protocols as plain TCP traffic. Aeraki Mesh is created to provide a non-intrusive, highly extendable way to manage any layer 7 traffic in a service mesh.

Note: Aeraki only handles none-HTTP laery-7 traffic in a service mesh, and leaves the HTTP traffic to other existing service mesh projects. (As they have already done a very good job on it, and we don't want to reinvent the wheel! ) Aeraki currently can be integrated with Istio, and it may support other service mesh projects in the future.

Problems to solve

We are facing some challenges in service meshes:

  • Istio and other popular service mesh implementations have very limited support for layer 7 protocols other than HTTP and gRPC.
  • Envoy RDS(Route Discovery Service) is solely designed for HTTP. Other protocols such as Dubbo and Thrift can only use listener in-line routes for traffic management, which breaks existing connections when routes change.
  • It takes a lot of effort to introduce a proprietary protocol into a service mesh. You’ll need to write an Envoy filter to handle the traffic in the data plane, and a control plane to manage those Envoy proxies.

Those obstacles make it very hard, if not impossible, for users to manage the traffic of other widely-used layer 7 protocols in microservices. For example, in a microservices application, we may have the below protocols:

  • RPC: HTTP, gRPC, Thrift, Dubbo, Proprietary RPC Protocol …
  • Messaging: Kafka, RabbitMQ …
  • Cache: Redis, Memcached …
  • Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB …

Common Layer 7 Protocols Used in Microservices

If you have already invested a lot of effort in migrating to a service mesh, of course, you want to get the most out of it — managing the traffic of all the protocols in your microservices.

Aeraki's approach

To address these problems, Aeraki Mesh providing a non-intrusive, extendable way to manage any layer 7 traffic in a service mesh. Aeraki

As this diagram shows, Aeraki Mesh consists of the following components:

  • Aeraki: Aeraki provides high-level, user-friendly traffic management rules to operations, translates the rules to envoy filter configurations, and leverages Istio’s EnvoyFilter API to push the configurations to the sidecar proxies. Aeraki also serves as the RDS server for MetaProtocol proxies in the data plane. Contrary to Envoy RDS, which focuses on HTTP, Aeraki RDS is aimed to provide a general dynamic route capability for all layer-7 protocols.
  • MetaProtocol Proxy: MetaProtocol Proxy provides common capabilities for Layer-7 protocols, such as load balancing, circuit breaker, load balancing, routing, rate limiting, fault injection, and auth. Layer-7 protocols can be built on top of MetaProtocol. To add a new protocol into the service mesh, the only thing you need to do is implementing the codec interface and a couple of lines of configuration. If you have special requirements which can’t be accommodated by the built-in capabilities, MetaProtocol Proxy also has an application-level filter chain mechanism, allowing users to write their own layer-7 filters to add custom logic into MetaProtocol Proxy.

Dubbo and Thrift have already been implemented based on MetaProtocol. More protocols are on the way. If you're using a close-source, proprietary protocol, you can also manage it in your service mesh simply by writing a MetaProtocol codec for it.

Most request/response style, stateless protocols can be built on top of the MetaProtocol Proxy. However, some protocols' routing policies are too "special" to be normalized in MetaProtocol. For example, Redis proxy uses a slot number to map a client query to a specific Redis server node, and the slot number is computed by the key in the request. Aeraki can still manage those protocols as long as there's an available Envoy Filter in the Envoy proxy side. Currently, for protocols in this category, Redis and Kafka are supported in Aeraki.

Reference

Supported protocols:

Aeraki can manage the below protocols in a service mesh：

  • Dubbo (Envoy native filter）
  • Thrift (Envoy native filter)
  • Kafka (Envoy native filter)
  • Redis (Envoy native filter)
  • MetaProtocol-Dubbo
  • MetaProtocol-Thfirt
  • MetaProtocol-QQ music(QQ 音乐)
  • MetaProtcool-Yangshiping(央视频)
  • MetaProtocol-Private protocol: Have a private protocol? No problem, any layer-7 protocols built on top of the MetaProtocol can be managed by Aeraki

Supported Features:

  • Traffic Management
    • Request Level Load Balancing/Locality Load Balancing
    • Flexible Route Match Conditions (any properties can be exacted from layer-7 packet and used as mach conditions)
    • Dynamic route update through Aeraki MetaRDS
    • Version Based Routing
    • Traffic Splittin
    • Local Rate Limit
    • Global Rate Limit
    • Traffic Mirroring
    • Request Transformation
  • Observability
    • Request level Metrics (Request latency, count, error, etc)
    • Distributed Tracing
  • Security
    • Peer Authorization on Interface/Method
    • Rquest Authorization

Demo

Live Demo: kiali Dashboard

Live Demo: Service Metrics: Grafana

Live Demo: Service Metrics: Prometheus

Screenshot: Service Metrics: Screenshot: Service Metrics

Recored Demo: Dubbo and Thrift Traffic Management Thrift and Dubbo traffic management demo

Install

Pre-requirements:

  • A running Kubernetes cluster, which can be either a cluster in the cloud, or a local cluster created with kind/minikube
  • Kubectl installed, and the ~/.kube/conf points to the cluster in the first step
  • Helm installed, which will be used to install some components in the demo

Download Aeraki from the Github

git clone https://github.com/aeraki-mesh/aeraki.git

Install Istio, Aeraki and demo Applications

make demo

Note: Aeraki needs to configure Istio with smart dns. If you already have an Istio installed and don't know how to turn on smart dns, please uninstall it. install-demo.sh will install Istio for you.

Uninstall Istio, Aeraki and demo Applications

make uninstall-demo

Open the following URLs in your browser to play with Aeraki and view service metrics

  • Kaili http://{istio-ingressgateway_external_ip}:20001
  • Grafana http://{istio-ingressgateway_external_ip}:3000
  • Prometheus http://{istio-ingressgateway_external_ip}:9090

You can import Aeraki demo dashboard from file demo/aeraki-demo.json into the Grafana.

Build

Pre-requirements:

  • Golang Version >= 1.16, and related golang tools installed like goimports, gofmt, etc.
  • Docker and Docker-Compose installed

Build Aeraki Binary

# build aeraki binary on linux
make build

# build aeraki binary on darwin
make build-mac

Build LazyXDS Binary

# build lazyxds binary on linux
make build.lazyxds

# build lazyxds binary on darwin
make build-mac.lazyxds

Build Aeraki Image

# build aeraki docker image with the default latest tag
make docker-build

# build aeraki docker image with xxx tag
make docker-build tag=xxx

# build aeraki e2e docker image
make docker-build-e2e

Build LazyXDS Image

# build lazyxds docker image with the default latest tag
make docker-build.lazyxds

# build lazyxds docker image with xxx tag
make docker-build.lazyxds tag=xxx

# build lazyxds e2e docker image
make docker-build-e2e.lazyxds

Talks

Who is using Aeraki?

Sincerely thank everyone for choosing, contributing, and using Aeraki. We created this issue to collect the use cases so we can drive the Aeraki community to evolve in the right direction and better serve your real-world scenarios. We encourage you to submit a comment on this issue to include your use case：aeraki-mesh#105

Contact

  • Mail: If you're interested in contributing to this project, please reach out to zhaohuabing@gmail.com
  • Wechat Group: Please contact Wechat ID: zhao_huabing to join the Aeraki Wechat group
  • Slack: Join Aeraki slack channel