kirugan / netramesh

Ultra light service mesh for any orchestrator

netramesh

Ultra light service mesh has main goals:

• high performance
• observability (Jaeger distributed tracing)
• simplicity of operation
• unlimited scalability
• any infrastructure compatibility
• transparency

Service mesh netramesh consists of two main parts:

• Transparent TCP proxy for microservices with original destination retrieval.
• Init container for network rules configuration (iptables based).

Getting started

Check out examples

Supported application level protocols

• HTTP/1.1 and lower

Also netra supports any TCP proto traffic (proxies it transparently).

How it works

To intercept all TCP traffic netra uses iptables redirect rules. After applying them, TCP traffic goes firstly to netra sidecar. Netra sidecar determines original destination using SO_ORIGINAL_DST socket option. After that netra sidecar works in bidirectional stream processing mode and proxies all TCP packets through itself. If app level protocol is HTTP1, netra parses it and sends tracing span.

Injecting

For now netra supports only manual injecting.

Basic configuration (environment variables)

Netra init (network interception settings)

Env name	Description
NETRA_SIDECAR_PORT	netra sidecar listen port redirect to (defaults to 14956)
NETRA_SIDECAR_USER_ID	netra sidecar user id to avoid infinite redirect loops (defaults to 1337)
NETRA_SIDECAR_GROUP_ID	netra sidecar group id to avoid infinite redirect loops (defaults to 1337)
INBOUND_INTERCEPT_PORTS	inbound ports to intercept (defaults to *, all ports)
OUTBOUND_INTERCEPT_PORTS	outbound ports to intercept (defaults to *, all ports)
NETRA_INBOUND_PROBABILITY	inbound probability to route TCP sessions (defaults to 1)
NETRA_OUTBOUND_PROBABILITY	outbound probability to route TCP sessions (defaults to 1)

Netra sidecar

Switches

Switch name	Description
--service-name	service name for jaeger distributed trace spans

Env name	Description
NETRA_LOGGER_LEVEL	logger level (defaults to info), supported values: debug, info, warning, error, fatal
NETRA_PORT	netra sidecar listen port (defaults to 14956)
NETRA_PPROF_PORT	netra sidecar pprof port (defaults to 14957)
NETRA_PROMETHEUS_PORT	netra prometheus port (defaults to 14958)
NETRA_TRACING_CONTEXT_EXPIRATION_MILLISECONDS	tracing context mapping cache expiration in milliseconds (defaults to 5000)
NETRA_TRACING_CONTEXT_CLEANUP_INTERVAL	tracing context cleanup interval in milliseconds (defaults to 1000)
NETRA_STATSD_ENABLED	enabling statsd. Set "true" to enable (defaults to false)
NETRA_STATSD_PREFIX	Statsd prefix for all metrics (defaults to "")
NETRA_STATSD_ADDRESS	Statsd gate (defaults to "")
NETRA_HTTP_PORTS	comma separated ports to determine as HTTP1 protocol (no default)
NETRA_HTTP_REQUEST_ID_HEADER_NAME	header name to match inbound and outbound requests. Applications should propagate it (defaults to X-Request-Id)
HTTP_HEADER_TAG_MAP	comma separated HTTP header to jaeger span tag conversion (example: x-session:http.session,x-mobile-info:http.x-mobile-info)
HTTP_COOKIE_TAG_MAP	comma separated HTTP cookie value to span tag conversion (example: sess:http.cookies.sess)
NETRA_HTTP_X_SOURCE_HEADER_NAME	source HTTP header name. Automatically added to each outbound request in case this header absent in request (defaults to X-Source)
NETRA_HTTP_X_SOURCE_VALUE	source HTTP header value (defaults to netra)
NETRA_HTTP_ROUTING_ENABLED	set this to value "true" to enable HTTP header routing feature (disabled by default)
NETRA_HTTP_ROUTING_HEADER_NAME	header name for HTTP header routing (defaults to X-Route). Value of header should be in the following format: host1=host2,host3=host4 to route host1 to host2 and host3 to host4.
NETRA_ROUTING_CONTEXT_EXPIRATION_MILLISECONDS	routing context mapping cache expiration in milliseconds (defaults to 5000)
NETRA_ROUTING_CONTEXT_CLEANUP_INTERVAL	routing context cleanup interval in milliseconds (defaults to 1000)
NETRA_HTTP_ROUTING_COOKIE_ENABLED	set this to value "true" to enable routing logic from HTTP Cookie (should be enabled with NETRA_HTTP_ROUTING_ENABLED). Cookie has priority to routing HTTP header (disabled by default)
NETRA_HTTP_ROUTING_COOKIE_NAME	cookie name for routing (defaults to X-Route)

Also it supports all env variables jaeger go library provides.

Comparison with Istio and linkerd2

Why do we need one more service mesh solution? Istio and linkerd2 are perfect service mesh solutions with very powerful set of features. But unfortunately they add significant resource and performance overhead. Netramesh main goal is providing observability to your distributed system with small overhead (approximately 10-50Mb on each netra sidecar) and 1ms of latency overhead. If you don't need entire set of features Istio and linkerd2 provide, but you need to collect distributed traces and obtain important information about your microservice interaction then netra is a great fit.