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
  • Features
  • SMI Specification Support
• OSM Design
• Install
  • Prerequisites
  • Get the OSM CLI
  • Install OSM
• Demos
• 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)

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

SMI Specification support

OSM Design

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

Install

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster running Kubernetes v1.15.0 or greater
• 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.

Demos

We have provided two demos for you to experience OSM.

• The automated demo is a set of scripts anyone can run and shows how OSM can manage, secure and provide observability for microservice environments.
• The manual demo is a step-by-step walkthrough set of instruction of the automated demo.

Using OSM

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

OSM Usage Patterns

1. Ingress and Egress
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 (coming soon)
• Public Community Call (coming soon)
• Mailing list

Development Guide

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

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for further details.

License

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