Aeraki, Manage any layer 7 traffic in Istio service mesh!

Aeraki [Air-rah-ki] is the Greek word for ‘breeze’. While Istio connects microservices in a service mesh, Aeraki provides a framework to allow Istio to support more layer 7 protocols other than just HTTP and gRPC. We hope that this breeze can help Istio sail a little further.

Problems to solve

We are facing some challenges in service mesh:

• Istio and other 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 and gRPC. 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 Envoys.

Aeraki’s approach

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

Aeraki Framework 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 general dynamic route capabilities 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. If you have special requirements which can’t be meet by the built-in capabilities, MetaProtocol Proxy also has a 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.

Need to manage proprietary protocols in Istio service mesh? All you need to do is just implementing the codec interface. Aeraki Framework will take care all the others for you. It’s so easy!

Aeraki also has plugins for the protocols which are too special to be fit into the MetaProtocol framework, such as Redis and Kafka, so these protocols can be managed in Istio service mesh.

Reference

Supported protocols:

• Dubbo

  • Service Discovery

  • Traffic Management
    • Request Level Load Balancing
    • Version Based Routing
    • Traffic Splitting
    • Method Based Routing
    • Header Based Routing
    • Crcuit Breaker
    • Locality Load Balancing
    • RDS(Route Discovery Service)
  • Observability
    • Dubbo Request Metrics
  • Security
    • Peer Authorization on Interface/Method
    • Rquest Authorization
• Thrift
  • Traffic Management
    • Request Level Load Balancing
    • Version Based Routing
    • Traffic Splitting
    • Header Based Routing
    • Rate Limit
  • Observability
    • Thrift Request Metrics
• Kafka
  • Metrics
• ZooKeeper
  • Metrics
• Redis
  • Redis Cluster
  • Sharding
  • Prefix Routing
  • Traffic Mirroring
• MySql
• MongoDB
• Postgres
• RocketMQ

Live Demo: kiali Dashboard

Live Demo: Service Metrics: Grafana

Live Demo: Service Metrics: Prometheus

Screenshot: Service Metrics:

Recored Demo: Dubbo and Thrift Traffic Management

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-framework/aeraki.git

Install Istio, Aeraki and demo applications

aeraki/demo/install-demo.sh

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.

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 Aeraika demo dashboard from file demo/aeraki-demo.json into the Grafana.

Talks

Contact

• Mail: If you’re interested in contributing to this project, please reach out to [email protected]
• Wechat Group: Please contact Wechat ID: zhao_huabing to join the Aeraki Wechat group
• Slack: Join Aeraki slack channel

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