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.

In a nutshell, you can think of Aeraki as the Operator pattern in Istio to automate the envoy configuration for layer 7 protocols.

IstioCon2021 Talk: How to Manage Any Layer-7 Traffic in an Istio Service Mesh?

Architecture

Problems to solve

We are facing some challenges in Istio traffic management:

• Istio has very limited built-in support for layer 7 protocols other than HTTP and gRPC.
• It's not feasible to add all these protocols directly into Istio codebase, because it will easily blow up the repository.
• Although you could change Pilot code to support other protocols, maintanence of an Istio fork is inevitable, which makes further upgrading process painful.
• EnvoyFilter could be a possible solution, but it can be very difficult to manually create and maintain those EnvoyFilters, especially in a large service mesh - too many trivial details and moving parts!

To address these problems, Aeraki works alongside Istio and provides an extensive way to manage the traffic of any layer 7 protocols.

Aeraki is a standalone component in the service mesh control plane. It follows a non-intrusive design and leverages Istio's EnvoyFilter API to push the configurations to the Envoy sidecar proxies.

Aeraki is a control plane framework for layer 7 protocol traffic management. We plan to support most of the widely used protocols such as Dubbo, Thrift, TARS, Redis, MySql, etc. If you're using a proprietary protocol, you can also write your own Aeraki plugin to support it in a service mesh.

Note: Although Aeraki is a standalone component, it does depend on Istio xds-mcp API and the configuration format generated by Pilot.

Protocol selection

Similar to Istio, protocols are identified by service port prefix. Please name service ports with this pattern: tcp-protocol-xxxx. For example, a dubbo service port may be named as tcp-dubbo-service. Please keep tcp at the beginning of the port name because it is a TCP service from the perspective of Istio.

Reference

Redis (中文)

Supported protocols:

• Dubbo
  • [x] Default routing
  • [x] Version-based routing
  • [x] Traffic splitting
  • [x] Metrics
  • [x] Method based routing
  • [ ] Header based routing
• Thrift
  • [x] Default routing
  • [x] Version-based routing
  • [x] Traffic splitting
  • [x] Metrics
  • [ ] Header based routing
  • [ ] Rate limit
• Kafka
  • [x] Metrics
• ZooKeeper
  • [x] Metrics
• Redis
  • [x] Redis Cluster
  • [x] Sharding
  • [x] Prefix routing
  • [x] Auth
  • [x] Traffic mirroring
• [ ] MySql
• [ ] MongoDB
• [ ] Postgres
• [ ] RocketMQ
• [ ] TARS
• ...

Demo

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 Aeraki and demo applications

aeraki/demo/install-demo.sh

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.

Contact

If you're interested in contributing to this project, please reach out to [email protected]