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.

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 Envoys.

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 …

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.

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

As this diagram shows, 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 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.

• Implement an application protocol
• Dubbo (中文)
• Redis (中文)
• LazyXDS（xDS 按需加载）

• Dubbo
  • Service Discovery
    • ServiceEntry Integration (Example)
    • ZooKeeper Integration
    • Nacos Integration
  • 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
  • Auth
  • Traffic Mirroring
• MySql
• MongoDB
• Postgres
• RocketMQ
• TARS
• ...

Live Demo: kiali Dashboard

Live Demo: Service Metrics: Grafana

Live Demo: Service Metrics: Prometheus

Screenshot: Service Metrics:

Recored Demo: Dubbo and Thrift Traffic Management

• 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

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

make install

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.

make uninstall

• 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.

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

# build aeraki binary on linux
make build

# build aeraki binary on darwin
make build-mac

# build lazyxds binary on linux
make build.lazyxds

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

# 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 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

• Istio meetup China(中文): 全栈服务网格 - Aeraki 助你在 Istio 服务网格中管理任何七层流量
• IstioCon 2021: How to Manage Any Layer-7 Traffic in an Istio Service Mesh?

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

• 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