Getting Started

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 OSM project builds on the ideas and implementations of many cloud native ecosystem projects including Linkerd, Istio, Consul, Envoy, Kuma, Helm, and the SMI specification.

Overview

OSM runs an Envoy based control plane on Kubernetes, can be configured with SMI APIs, and works by injecting an Envoy proxy as a sidecar container next to each instance of your application. The proxy contains and executes rules around access control policies, implements routing configuration, and captures metrics. The control plane continually configures proxies to ensure policies and routing rules are up to date and ensures proxies are healthy.

Core Principles

  1. Simple to understand and contribute to
  2. Effortless to install, maintain, and operate
  3. Painless to troubleshoot
  4. Easy to configure via Service Mesh Interface (SMI)

Features

  1. Easily and transparently configure traffic shifting for deployments
  2. Secure service to service communication by enabling mTLS
  3. Define and execute fine grained access control policies for services
  4. Observability and insights into application metrics for debugging and monitoring services
  5. Integrate with external certificate management services/solutions with a pluggable interface
  6. Onboard applications onto the mesh by enabling automatic sidecar injection of Envoy proxy

Project Status

OSM is under active development and is NOT ready for production workloads.

Support

Please search open issues on GitHub, and if your issue isn’t already represented please open a new one. The OSM project maintainers will respond to the best of their abilities.

SMI Specification Support

Specification Component Supported Release Comments
Traffic Access Control v1alpha3
Traffic Specs v1alpha4
Traffic Split v1alpha2
Traffic Metrics v1alpha1 🚧 In Progress #379 🚧
OSM manual demo

The manual demo is a step-by-step walkthrough set of instruction of the automated demo.

OSM automated demo

The automated demo is a set of scripts anyone can run and shows how OSM can manage, secure and provide observability for microservice environments.