kmesh: A C repository from xietangxin

Introduction

Kmesh is a high-performance service mesh data plane software based on programmable kernel. Provides high-performance service communication infrastructure in service mesh scenarios.

Why Kmesh

Challenges of the Service Mesh Data Plane

The service mesh software represented by Istio has gradually become popular and has become an important component of cloud infrastructure. However, the current service mesh still face some challenges:

Extra latency overhead at the proxy layer: Single hop service access increases by 2~3ms, which cannot meet the SLA requirements of latency-sensitive applications. Although the community has come up with a variety of data plane solutions to this problem, the overhead introduced by agents cannot be completely reduced.
High resources occupation: The agent occupies extra CPU/MEM overhead, and the deployment density of service container decreases.

Kmesh：Kernel-native traffic governance

Kmesh innovatively proposes to move traffic governance to the OS, and build a transparent sidecarless service mesh without passing through the proxy layer on the data path.

Key features of Kmesh

Smooth Compatibility

Application-transparent Traffic Management
Automatically interconnecting with Istiod

High Performance

Forwarding delay 60%↓
Service startup performance 40%↑

Low Overhead

ServiceMesh data plane overhead 70%↓

Safety Isolation

eBPF Virtual machine security
Cgroup level orchestration isolation

Full Stack Visualization

E2E observation*
Integration with Mainstream Observability Platforms*

Open Ecology

Supports XDS protocol standards

Note: * Planning

Quick Start

prerequisite
- Currently, Kmesh connects to the Istio control plane. Before starting Kmesh, install the Istio control plane software. For details, see https://istio.io/latest/docs/setup/getting-started/#install.
- The complete Kmesh capability depends on the OS enhancement. Check whether the execution environment is in the OS list supported by Kmesh. For other OS environments, see Kmesh Compilation and Building.

Kmesh container image prepare

# add an image registry: ghcr.io
[root@ ~]# cat /etc/docker/daemon.json
    {
            "insecure-registries": [
                    ...,
                    "ghcr.io"
            ]
    }

# docker pull
[root@ ~]# docker pull ghcr.io/kmesh-net/kmesh:latest

Start Kmesh
```
# get kmesh.yaml from build/docker/kmesh.yaml
[root@ ~]# kubectl apply -f kmesh.yaml
```
By default, the Kmesh base function is used, other function can be selected by adjusting the startup parameters in the yaml file.

Check kmesh service status

[root@ ~]# kubectl get pods -A -owide | grep kmesh
  default        kmesh-deploy-j8q68                   1/1     Running   0          6h15m   192.168.11.6    node1   <none>

View the running status of kmesh service

[root@ ~]# kubectl logs -f kmesh-deploy-j8q68
  time="2023-07-25T09:28:37+08:00" level=info msg="options InitDaemonConfig successful" subsys=manager
  time="2023-07-25T09:28:38+08:00" level=info msg="bpf Start successful" subsys=manager
  time="2023-07-25T09:28:38+08:00" level=info msg="controller Start successful" subsys=manager
  time="2023-07-25T09:28:38+08:00" level=info msg="command StartServer successful" subsys=manager

More compilation methods of Kmesh, See: Kmesh Compilation and Construction

Kmesh Performance

Based on Fortio, the data plane execution performance of Kmesh and Envoy was compared and tested. The test results are as follows:

For a complete performance test, please refer to Kmesh Performance Test.

Software Architecture

The main components of Kmesh include:

kmesh-controller：

Kmesh management program, responsible for Kmesh lifecycle management, XDS protocol docking, observation and DevOps, and other functions.
kmesh-api：

The API interface layer provided by Kmesh mainly includes: orchestration API after xds conversion, observation and DevOps channels, etc.
kmesh-runtime：

The runtime implemented in the kernel that supports L3~L7 traffic orchestration.
kmesh-orchestration：

Implement L3-L7 traffic scheduling based on ebpf, such as routing, grayscale, load balance, etc.
kmesh-probe：

Observation and DevOps probes, providing end-to-end observation capabilities.

Feature Description

Command List

Kmesh Command List
Demo

Kmesh demo demonstration

Kmesh Capability Map

Feature Field	Feature	2023.H1	2023.H2	2024.H1	2024.H2
Traffic management	sidecarless mesh data plane
	sockmap accelerate
	Programmable governance based on ebpf
	http1.1 protocol
	http2 protocol
	grpc protocol
	quic protocol
	tcp protocol
	Retry
	Routing
	load balance
	Fault injection
	Gray release
	Circuit Breaker
	Rate Limits
Service security	mTLS
	L7 authorization
	Cgroup-level isolation
Traffic monitoring	Governance indicator monitoring
	End-to-End observability
Programmable	Plug-in expansion capability
Ecosystem collaboration	Data plane collaboration (Envoy etc.)
Operating environment support	container

Contact

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us in the following ways:

Contributing

If you're interested in being a contributor and want to get involved in developing the Kmesh code, please see CONTRIBUTING for details on submitting patches and the contribution workflow.

License

Kmesh is under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Kmesh documentation is under the CC-BY-4.0 license.

Credit

This project was initially incubated in the openEuler community, thanks openEuler Community for the help on promoting this project in early days.

xietangxin/kmesh