loom

⚡🧵A Zig-Based Service Mesh for Kubernetes – For Learning, Building, and Exploring.🧵⚡

Overview

Welcome to loom! 🚨 This project is my personal exploration into the world of service meshes, inspired by Envoy and built using the Zig programming language.🎓 The primary goal is educational: to gain hands-on experience with Kubernetes, understand microservices networking, and explore the design and implementation challenges of a service mesh 🕸️.

Why loom?

• 📖 Educational Journey: I’m building loom to deepen my understanding of Kubernetes internals, traffic management, observability, chaos testing and the intricacies of service-to-service communication.
• 🕵️ Zig Exploration: Zig’s performance, safety, and simplicity make it an excellent candidate for building low-level, high-performance systems like a service mesh.

What loom Does

At its core, loom is designed to:

• 🚦 Manage Traffic: Route, load balance, and implement basic circuit breaking between services.
• 👀 Enhance Observability: Collect logs, metrics, and provide tracing hooks to monitor service interactions.
• 👮 Enforce Security: Facilitate secure communication (e.g., TLS) between microservices.
• 🪢 Integrate with Kubernetes: Discover services and endpoints dynamically through the Kubernetes API.

Roadmap

MVP

• 🛻 Basic Traffic Routing: Implement fundamental request routing between services.
• ⚖️ Load Balancing: Distribute requests evenly across available service instances.
• 🪵 Logging & Metrics: Integrate simple logging and metrics to monitor traffic and health.
• 🪄 Kubernetes Service Discovery: Connect with the Kubernetes API to dynamically fetch service endpoints.

Next Steps

• 🦜 mTLS Integration: Secure service-to-service communication using mutual TLS.
• 🧑‍⚖️ Advanced Routing Policies: Add features such as retries, timeouts, and basic circuit breaking.
• 🧵 Distributed Tracing: Introduce hooks for tracing requests across services for better observability.
• ✍️ Dynamic Configuration: Enable hot-reloading and runtime configuration changes via Kubernetes CRDs or similar mechanisms.

Future Explorations

• ⁉️ Fault Injection & Testing: Simulate failures to test resiliency.
• 🛣️ Policy-Based Routing: Experiment with routing based on custom policies and metadata.
• 🐢 Rate Limiting & Quotas: Implement traffic control mechanisms to prevent service overload.

Contributing

I welcome contributions, ideas, and feedback! If you’re interested in exploring the internals of service meshes or have suggestions for new features (or educational experiments), please open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

loom is released under the MIT License.

🛡️🕸️⚡