smi-spec VS kubefed

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

The project is similar (in spirit) to kubefed.

What Is KubeFed? KubeFed (Kubernetes Cluster Federation) allows you to use a single Kubernetes cluster to coordinate multiple Kubernetes clusters. It can deploy multiple-cluster applications in different regions and design for disaster recovery. To learn more about KubeFed: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubefed

There's active work on a standard called kubefed [0] that is being worked on.

> I want a scale-to-zero node-pool in every region, and one kube master api for the world.

Personally, I'd generalize this to: "I want to describe the reliability requirements and configuration for my software and have an automated system solve for where, how many, when, and how to route to it"

I want to have something where I can say "I need to have high availability, lowest latency, and X GB of RAM and Y cores" and have a system automatically schedule me wherever compute is cheapest while also intelligently routing traffic to my servers based on client origins.

[0] - https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubefed

Two of the more common approaches to deploying Kubernetes in hybrid environments are from cloud-to-cloud and cloud to on-prem. Whether this is from using a single control plane like Rancher, Platform9, or Gardener to create multiple clusters that are managed from a single location, or utilizing Kubernetes federation to create a cluster that spans different regions, this model has become a key feature offered by Kubernetes that has helped drive adoption.

This is made possible by the very nature of Kubernetes being a standard portable platform across cloud providers, ability to manage infrastructure as code, ability to setup networking between them whenever needed with the help of multi-cluster service meshes and also due to the ability to orchestrate the deployments using Kubefed and Crossplane.

And the interesting thing about networking in cloud is that it need not be just be limited to the cloud provider within your region but can span across multiple providers across multiple regions as needed and this is where projects like Kubefed, Crossplane definitely does help.

Projects like Kubefed and Crossplane are especially useful here since they help you to manage and orchestrate clusters and the requests you send across different cloud providers even if its going to be across regions.