osm VS smi-spec

If you'd like to go a bit deeper into service mesh technology, be sure to check out the resources listed below then head over to the Open Service Mesh with Azure Kubernetes Service lab to get hands-on and see a service mesh in action! Open Service Mesh is an open-source, lightweight service mesh that is easy to install and operate, so I encourage you to take it for a spin 🚀

osm-edge forked from Open Service Mesh is a lightweight, extensible, cloud-native, SMI-compatible service mesh built purposely for Edge computing. osm-edge uses lightweight programmable proxy Pipy as a sidecar proxy.

osm-edge is built on top of Open Service Mesh (OSM) v1.1.0 codebase and is a lightweight service mesh for resource-sensitive cloud environments and edge computing scenarios. It uses osm as the control plane and Pipy as the data plane and features high performance, low resources, simplicity, ease of use, scalability, and compatibility (x86/arm64 support).

osm-edge is a fork of open service mesh and we will strive to keep this fork in sync with its upstream and propose back major changes and/or feature proposals to upstream for broader benefits of the community. Both OSM and osm-edge are hosted on Github. If you have any feature request, question, or comment, we’d love to have you join the rapidly-growing community via Github Issues, Pull Requests, or osm slack channel!

Link: https://github.com/openservicemesh/osm/issues/4840

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes allows us to attach and configure Kubernetes clusters running anywhere. Open Service Mesh (OSM) is a lightweight, extensible, Cloud Native service mesh that allows users to uniformly manage, secure, and get out-of-the-box observability features for highly dynamic microservice environments. The Open Service Mesh (OSM) extension is a managed service mesh for Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters that is lightweight and extensible.

Pull Request template from the Open Service Mesh project

The Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification was created to solve this portability issue.

> I suspect if a Service Mesh is ultimately shown to have broad value, one will make it's way into the K8S core

I'm not so sure. I suspect it'll follow the same roadmap as Gateway API, which it already kind of is with the Service Mesh Interface (https://smi-spec.io/)

It is very common that a service mesh deploys a control plane and a data plane. The control plane does what you might expect; it controls the service mesh and gives you the ability to interact with it. Many service meshes implement the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) which is an API specification to standardize the way cluster operators interact with and implement features.

Before we start, let's review the SMI Access Control Specification. There are two forms of traffic policies in osm-edge: Permissive Mode and Traffic Policy Mode. The former allows services in the mesh to access each other, while the latter requires the provision of the appropriate traffic policy to be accessible.

osm-edge is a simple, complete, and standalone service mesh and ships out-of-the-box with all the necessary components to deploy a complete service mesh. As a lightweight and SMI-compatible Service Mesh, osm-edge is designed to be intuitive and scalable.

I started on Monday, attending ServiceMeshCon2019. My guesstimate is that about 1000 people attended it. I believe Service Mesh is playing such a crucial role in scaling cloud native technologies that large scale cloud-native deployments may not be possible without service mesh. Just like you cannot really succeed in deploying a microservices based application without a microservices orchestration engine, like Kubernetes, you cannot scale the size and capacity of a microservices-based application without service mesh. That’s what makes it so compelling to see all the service mesh creators — Istio, Linkerd, Consul, Kuma — and listen to them. There was also a lot of discussion of SMI (Service Mesh Interface) — a common interface among all services mesh. The panel at the end of the day included all the major service mesh players, and some very thought provoking questions were asked and answered by the panel.

Do you need a Service Mesh?

In the episode with Annie, she gave a great overview of the CNCF and a handful of projects that she's excited about. Those include Helm, Linkerd, Kudo, Keda and Artifact Hub. I gave a bonus example of the Service Mesh Interface project.

SMI official website: https://smi-spec.io