kmesh-net / kmesh

High Performance ServiceMesh Data Plane Based on Programmable Kernel

Introduction

Kmesh is a high-performance service mesh data plane software based on programmable kernel. Provides high-performance service communication infrastructure in service mesh scenarios.

Why Kmesh

Challenges of the Service Mesh Data Plane

The service mesh software represented by Istio has gradually become popular and has become an important component of cloud infrastructure. However, the current service mesh still face some challenges:

• Extra latency overhead at the proxy layer: Single hop service access increases by 2~3ms, which cannot meet the SLA requirements of latency-sensitive applications. Although the community has come up with a variety of data plane solutions to this problem, the overhead introduced by agents cannot be completely reduced.
• High resources occupation: The agent occupies extra CPU/MEM overhead, and the deployment density of service container decreases.

Kmesh：Kernel-native traffic governance

Kmesh innovatively proposes to move traffic governance to the OS, and build a transparent sidecarless service mesh without passing through the proxy layer on the data path.

Key features of Kmesh

Smooth Compatibility

• Application-transparent Traffic Management
• Automatically interconnecting with Istiod

High Performance

• Forwarding delay 60%↓
• Service startup performance 40%↑

Low Overhead

• ServiceMesh data plane overhead 70%↓

Safety Isolation

• eBPF Virtual machine security
• Cgroup level orchestration isolation

Full Stack Visualization

• E2E observation*
• Integration with Mainstream Observability Platforms*

Open Ecology

• Supports XDS protocol standards

Note: * Planning

Quick Start

Please refer to quick start.

Kmesh Performance

Based on Fortio, the data plane execution performance of Kmesh and Envoy was compared and tested. The test results are as follows:

For a complete performance test, please refer to Kmesh Performance Test.

Software Architecture

The main components of Kmesh include:

• Kmesh-daemon: The management program responsible for Kmesh lifecycle management, XDS protocol integration, observability, and other functions.
• Ebpf orchestration: The traffic orchestration implemented based on eBPF, including routing, canary deployments, load balancing, and more.
• Waypoint: Based on istio proxy to adapt to Kmesh protocol, responsible for L7 traffic governance.

Feature Description

• Command List

  Kmesh Command List

• Demo

  Kmesh demo demonstration

Kmesh Capability Map

Feature Field	Feature	2023.H1	2023.H2	2024.H1	2024.H2
Traffic management	sidecarless mesh data plane	√
	sockmap accelerate		√
	Programmable governance based on ebpf	√
	http1.1 protocol	√
	http2 protocol				√
	grpc protocol				√
	quic protocol				√
	tcp protocol		√
	Retry			√
	Routing	√
	load balance	√
	Fault injection			√
	Gray release		√
	Circuit Breaker			√
	Rate Limits			√
Service security	mTLS				√
	L7 authorization				√
	Cgroup-level isolation	√
Traffic monitoring	Governance indicator monitoring		√
	End-to-End observability				√
Programmable	Plug-in expansion capability				√
Ecosystem collaboration	Data plane collaboration (Envoy etc.)		√
Operating environment support	container	√

Contact

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us in the following ways:

• meeting notes
• mailing list
• slack
• twitter

Contributing

If you're interested in being a contributor and want to get involved in developing the Kmesh code, please see CONTRIBUTING for details on submitting patches and the contribution workflow.

License

Kmesh is under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Kmesh documentation is under the CC-BY-4.0 license.

Credit

This project was initially incubated in the openEuler community, thanks openEuler Community for the help on promoting this project in early days.