Slime is an intelligent ServiceMesh manager based on istio. Through slime, we can define dynamic service management strategies, so as to achieve the purpose of automatically and conveniently using istio/envoy high-level functions.
As new generation architecture of micro-service, service mesh uses Istio+Envoy to achieve the decouple of business logic and micro-service control logic. Thus it can decrease the budget of devlopment and operation.
Istio has many functions, such as multi-version control, grayscale release, load balancer. However, it is not perfect in high-level features of microservice governance, like local rate limit, black and white list, downgrade. Mixer is born to solve these problem by aggregating these data plane functions to Mixer Adapter. Although this solves the problem of function expansion, the centralized architecture has been questioned by many followers about its performance. Then Istio abandoned Mixer in the new version. This makes the expansion of high-level functions a piece of void in the current version.
Another problem is Pilot config is full push. This means massive configurations need to be pushed in large-scale grid scenarios. Users have to figure out the dependencies between services and create SidecarScope in advance. This undoubtedly increases the burden on operation and maintenance personnel.
In order to solving the current shortcomings of Istio, we make Slime project. It is based on Kubernetes operator. As a CRD controller of Istio, Slime can seamlessly using with Istio without any customization.
Slime adopts a modular architecture inside. It contains three useful modules now.
Configuration Lazy Loading: No need to configure SidecarScope, automatically load configuration on demand, solving full push problem. The source of the service relationship supports Prometheus or Accesslog.
Http Plugin Management: Use the new CRD pluginmanager/envoyplugin to wrap readability , The poor maintainability of envoyfilter makes plug-in extension more convenient.
Adaptive Ratelimit: It can be automatically combined with adaptive ratelimit strategy based on metrics, solving rate limit problem.
The Slime architecture is mainly divided into three parts:
- slime-boot，the operator component which can deploy Slime (slime-modules and slime-framework).
- slime-modules，core processes of Slime, watch Slime CRD and convert to Istio CRD, and process other built-in logic.
- slime-framework, as a base, provide generic base capabilities for modules.
Slime supports aggregated packaging, allowing any module to be aggregated into a single image. So Slime can be deployed as a single deployment, avoiding too many components.
Slime-module
- Wechat Group: Please contact Wechat ID:
yonka_hustto join the group - QQ Group: 971298863
- Slack: https://slimeslime-io.slack.com/invite
- email: slimedotio@gmail.com
- You'll find many other useful documents on our official web Slime-Home