smi-spec VS cloudwithchris.com

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

Navigate to a GitHub Repository that you own. For example, I am the organization owner of CloudWithChris, so will navigate to my cloudwithchris.com repository.

For example, the website you're reading (Cloud With Chris) is - and has been - hosted using the Static Websites on Azure Storage approach since March 2020. As an end-user, when you navigate to www.cloudwithchris.com, you'll be routed to an Azure CDN instance that is fronting the Azure Storage Account which hosts the production Static Website. The CDN is how I'm able to have an SSL Certificate mapped against a Custom Domain, otherwise that wouldn't be possible directly on the storage account (as there's no way to map a custom SSL certificate in that way directly).

So, what's the point in this post (other than reinforcing a brilliant episode, thank you again Annie)? Over time, I'll release a set of blog posts which cover these CNCF projects. I don't have a timeframe. I don't have a specific goal in mind just yet. But given that it's Cloud with Chris, it does feel that Cloud native should have a spot in there somewhere. So stay tuned! If you'd like me to focus on any projects in particular, please let me know either in the Cloud With Chris GitHub repository by raising a GitHub Issue, or letting me know on Twitter, @reddobowen.

Now, one of the main points that I raise in my usual talk on hosting websites using the Static Content Hosting pattern is the significant cost-benefit of doing this. In an average month, I spend less than £5 for the entire end-to-end running of my environments. Yes, environments plural - that includes Preview, Staging and production, and also includes the cost of streaming my audio files to third party platforms like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and consumed directly from www.cloudwithchris.com.

There are plenty of existing articles that talk about how to optimise these common SEO practices, so I recommend you search for these as I'm going to aim to not reinvent the wheel. If you're interested on how I achieve some of these in Cloud with Chris, you can take a look at the metadata partial template that I use within my Hugo template.

name: "Podcast Audio Upload" on: push: branches: - master paths: - "podcast_audio/**" jobs: publish: environment: name: production.azure url: https://www.cloudwithchris.com runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Download Podcast files that are different from prior commit run: | git clone --config lfs.fetchexclude="/podcast_audio" https://github.com/chrisreddington/cloudwithchris.com.git ./ fileschanged=$(git diff --name-only HEAD^ HEAD -- '*.mp3') echo "$fileschanged" > files.txt xargs -a files.txt -d'\n' rm git config --unset lfs.fetchexclude git checkout . cd podcast_audio sed -i -e 's/podcast_audio\///g' ../files.txt for i in *; do if ! grep -qxFe "$i" ../files.txt then echo "Deleting: $i" rm "$i" fi done - name: Azure Login uses: azure/login@v1 with: creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }} - name: "Upload podcast files to storage that don't yet exist" uses: azure/CLI@v1 with: azcliversion: 2.20.0 inlineScript: | az storage blob upload-batch --account-name cloudwithchrisprod -d 'podcasts' -s '/github/workspace/podcast_audio' --if-unmodified-since 2020-01-01T00:00Z --auth-mode login

Once you have added the Public GPG Key details to GitHub, you can now go ahead and push your local changes to GitHub by using git push (If you haven't already associated a remote location with the Git repository, then you may also need to use the git remote add command, and then use git push). Assuming that the Public Key in the GPG Keys section of your GitHub account corresponds with the Private Key used to sign the commits, then you will notice that commits will be marked as verified in the GitHub user interface. See the example below from the cloudwithchris.com Git Repository Commits page.

Similarly, Cloud With Chris is an example of a JAMStack site, driven by Hugo, a static website generator. Rather than calling any backend APIs, the content is all entirely driven by markdown which is hosted in the GitHub repository mentioned a moment ago. This means I'm not calling any external APIs. Instead, the content is finalised at deployment time. I run a command in my GitHub Actions (Hugo build) which goes ahead and takes my site's configuration, necessary theme information and content, and renders the needed files to generate the set of webpages to render to my clients. The content is then uploaded to an Azure Blob Storage account which is publicly accessible and configured using the Static Website functionality.