Gloo Edge and AWS App Mesh
AWS App Mesh is an AWS-native service mesh implementation based on Envoy Proxy making it compatible with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools. AWS App Mesh is a managed and highly available service, AWS manages the service-mesh control plane and you connect up the data plane to the control plane by installing and configuring an Envoy Proxy instance next to your workloads. You can use AWS App Mesh with AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes running on AWS, to better run your application at scale.
Gloo Edge complements service-mesh technology by bringing a powerful “API Gateway” to the edge (or even inside) of your mesh to handle things like:
- Oauth Flows
- Request/Response transformation
- API Aggregation with GraphQL
- Function routing
- And more.
Please see our FAQ for more on how Gloo Edge can complement a service mesh.
Getting started with AWS App Mesh
For this guide, we’ll assume you want to use AWS App Mesh on Kubernetes (AWS EKS in this case, but it can be any Kubernetes on AWS), but AWS App Mesh is not limited to Kubernetes.
We recommend you follow this link: [Tutorial: Configure App Mesh Integration with Kubernetes] (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/app-mesh/latest/userguide/mesh-k8s-integration.html) for getting started with AWS App Mesh and setting up the examples.
We will assumed that you use color-mesh as the name of your mesh and you deployed your EKS cluster in the us-east-2 (Ohio) as the AWS region.
Once you have the examples installed, you should have an environment like this:
kubectl -n appmesh-demo get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
colorgateway-69cd4fc669-xv55k 2/2 Running 0 57m
colorteller-845959f54-tdzjq 2/2 Running 0 57m
colorteller-black-6cc98458db-lq257 2/2 Running 0 57m
colorteller-blue-88bcffddb-vt2ls 2/2 Running 0 57m
colorteller-red-6f55b447db-znk8j 2/2 Running 0 57m
Notice that we have Envoy Proxy running next to the workloads.
You should also verify you have all the Virtual Nodes, Virtual Routers, Routes, and Virtual Services:
kubectl -n appmesh-demo get virtualservice.appmesh.k8s.aws,virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws
NAME AGE
virtualservice.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorgateway.appmesh-demo 1d
virtualservice.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorteller.appmesh-demo 1d
NAME AGE
virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorgateway 1d
virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorteller 1d
virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorteller-black 1d
virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorteller-blue 1d
virtualnode.appmesh.k8s.aws/colorteller-red 1d
aws --region us-east-2 appmesh describe-route --route-name color-route-appmesh-demo \
--virtual-router-name colorgateway-appmesh-demo --mesh-name color-mesh
{
"route": {
"meshName": "color-mesh",
"metadata": {
"arn": "arn:aws:appmesh:us-east-2:992143172250:mesh/color-mesh/virtualRouter/colorgateway-appmesh-demo/route/color-route-appmesh-demo",
"createdAt": 1566324369.64,
"lastUpdatedAt": 1566324369.64,
"uid": "25d95b1d-ec98-47d4-be46-aaafbdcedfbf",
"version": 1
},
"routeName": "color-route-appmesh-demo",
"spec": {
"httpRoute": {
"action": {
"weightedTargets": [
{
"virtualNode": "colorgateway-appmesh-demo",
"weight": 1
}
]
},
"match": {
"prefix": "/color"
}
}
},
"status": {
"status": "ACTIVE"
},
"virtualRouterName": "colorgateway-appmesh-demo"
}
}
aws --region us-east-2 appmesh describe-route --route-name color-route-appmesh-demo \
--virtual-router-name colorteller-appmesh-demo --mesh-name color-mesh
{
"route": {
"meshName": "color-mesh",
"metadata": {
"arn": "arn:aws:appmesh:us-east-2:992143172250:mesh/color-mesh/virtualRouter/colorteller-appmesh-demo/route/color-route-appmesh-demo",
"createdAt": 1566324367.037,
"lastUpdatedAt": 1566328452.747,
"uid": "4899bec5-4f80-449c-8ddc-e8ec388a1b56",
"version": 6
},
"routeName": "color-route-appmesh-demo",
"spec": {
"httpRoute": {
"action": {
"weightedTargets": [
{
"virtualNode": "colorteller-appmesh-demo",
"weight": 1
},
{
"virtualNode": "colorteller-black-appmesh-demo",
"weight": 1
},
{
"virtualNode": "colorteller-blue-appmesh-demo",
"weight": 1
}
]
},
"match": {
"prefix": "/"
}
},
"priority": 1
},
"status": {
"status": "ACTIVE"
},
"virtualRouterName": "colorteller-appmesh-demo"
}
}
Using Gloo Edge as the Ingress for AWS App Mesh
In our above example, the colorgateway service calls the colorteller service which has a few variants (colorteller, colorteller-black , colorteller-blue). Both of those services are part of the mesh, and we can control the routing between the components with the mesh. To get traffic into the mesh with a powerful API Gateway like Gloo Edge, all we have to do is the following:
- Install Gloo Edge
- Create a Gloo Edge VirtualService
- Create a Route to where we want to bring traffic into the mesh
Installing Gloo Edge is covered adequately in other sections of the documentation.
To accomplish steps 2 and 3, run the following command:
glooctl add route --path-prefix /appmesh/color \
--prefix-rewrite /color --dest-name appmesh-demo-colorgateway-9080
Now let’s figure out what the right URL is to contact Gloo Edge:
glooctl proxy url
http://a034a61854c2111e992a70a2a7eb7b9a-398563398.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com:80
And then call our new API:
curl $(glooctl proxy url)/appmesh/color
{"color":"white", "stats": {"black":0.34,"blue":0.35,"white":0.31}}
And there you have it! You now have a powerful L7 Ingress and API Gateway for managing traffic coming into your cluster being served with AWS App Mesh.
Limitations
Currently, AWS App Mesh is fairly simple in its capabilities. It does very limited routing, cannot do mTLS, etc. As AWS App Mesh adds more capabilities, we’ll integrate deeper. The AWS App Mesh roadmap is publicly available and can be found on GitHub.
Even with its current limitations, if you would like to connect multiple meshes together (multiple AWS App Mesh or other heterogeneous implementations like Istio), please check out the SuperGloo project where we make it easy to stitch together multiple meshes.