Open Service Mesh (OSM)

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.

Table of Contents

• Overview
  • Core Principles
  • Documentation
  • Features
  • Project Status
  • Support
  • SMI Specification Support
• OSM Design
• Install
  • Prerequisites
  • Get the OSM CLI
  • Install OSM
• Demonstration
• Using OSM
  • OSM Usage Patterns
• Community
• Development Guide
• Code of Conduct
• License

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)

Documentation

Documentation pertaining to the usage of Open Service Mesh is made available at docs.openservicemesh.io.

Documentation pertaining to development, release workflows, and other repository specific documentation, can be found in the docs folder.

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 ready for production workloads.

Support

See SUPPORT

SMI Specification support

OSM Design

Read more about OSM's high level goals, design, and architecture.

Install

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster running an active Kubernetes releases. The range of supported Kubernetes versions is defined in the OSM Helm chart.
• kubectl current context is configured for the target cluster install
  • kubectl config current-context

Get the OSM CLI

The simplest way of installing Open Service Mesh on a Kubernetes cluster is by using the osm CLI.

Download the osm binary from the Releases page. Unpack the osm binary and add it to $PATH to get started.

sudo mv ./osm /usr/local/bin/osm

Install OSM

$ osm install

See the installation guide for more detailed options.

Demonstration

The OSM Bookstore demo is a step-by-step walkthrough of how to install a bookbuyer and bookstore apps, and configure connectivity between these using SMI.

Using OSM

After installing OSM, onboard a microservice application to the service mesh.

OSM Usage Patterns

1. Traffic Management
2. Observability
3. Certificates
4. Sidecar Injection

Community

Connect with the Open Service Mesh community:

• GitHub issues and pull requests in this repo
• OSM Slack: Join the CNCF Slack for related discussions in #openservicemesh
• OSM Community meetings take place on the second Tuesday of each month, 10:30am-11am Pacific in the CNCF OSM Zoom room
  • Calendar invite
  • Meeting notes
  • CNCF YouTube Playlist for OSM community meetings
• Mailing list
• OSM Twitter

Development Guide

If you would like to contribute to OSM, check out the development guide.

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for further details.

License

This software is covered under the Apache 2.0 license. You can read the license here.