Microsoft has released open service mesh (OSM), an alpha service mesh implementation compliant with the SMI specification. OSM covers standard features of a service mesh like canary releases, secure communication, and application insights, similar to other service mesh implementations like Istio, Linkerd, or Consul. Additionally, the OSM team is in the process of donating the project to the CNCF.
OSM is a new option in the service mesh space and other similar projects like Istio, Linkerd, Consul, or Kuma. OSM is a service mesh open-source project initiated by Microsoft. It’s implementing the service mesh interface (SMI), a set of standard and portable APIs to deploy a service mesh in Kubernetes. When users configure a service mesh through SMI specification, they don’t need to be specific about which service implementation they’re running in the cluster.
Additionally, OSM comes with standard and basic service mesh features like canary releases, secure service communication, and application insights. In this alpha release, OSM comes with the ability to configure traffic shifting policies, secure communication within services through mTLS, grained access control policies, application metrics, external certificate managers, and inject the sidecar Envoy proxy automatically. Moreover, similar to other projects like Istio, OSM uses Envoy as a sidecar proxy for communicating with other services in the mesh. However, in the OSM project repository, they mention that any xDS (service discovery protocol) compatible reverse-proxy might be used or to use advanced Envoy features.
When a user creates a pod, OSM intercepts the API through a mutate webhook to inject the Envoy sidecar proxy, and an init container uses iptables to ensure that all the traffic flows through Envoy. OSM handles access control rules, routing policies, encrypts communication, and collects metrics that, by default, can be seen in Grafana and Zipkin. Users can find more details about each of the architecture components of OSM on the project’s design page. But at a high level, the below image represents the OSM components and interactions:
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