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Aeraki Mesh

Aeraki Mesh is a cloud-native traffic management framework for service meshes that extends Istio to manage Layer 7 protocols beyond Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and gRPC using Envoy-based proxies.

  • Extends Istio (service mesh) to support multiple Layer 7 protocols through a unified traffic management model.
  • Provides protocol-specific traffic management for Dubbo, Thrift, Redis, Kafka, and other non-HTTP services (application networking).
  • Defines custom resource definitions (CRDs) for fine-grained routing, observability, and policy control of non-HTTP protocols (Kubernetes extension).
  • Uses Envoy and xDS APIs (data plane proxy) to implement protocol-aware filters and configurations managed through Kubernetes.
  • Enables consistent governance, security, and observability for heterogeneous microservices in a single mesh (microservices networking).

More About Aeraki Mesh

Aeraki Mesh is an open-source framework that extends the capabilities of Istio-based service meshes to manage multiple Layer 7 protocols, including non-HTTP and non-gRPC traffic, through Envoy-based data planes. The project focuses on enabling enterprises to bring heterogeneous microservices that rely on protocols such as Dubbo, Thrift, Redis, and Kafka under a single, consistent traffic management and observability plane.

At its core, Aeraki Mesh operates in the service mesh category, building on Kubernetes (container orchestration) and Istio (service mesh) to provide protocol-aware governance for application traffic. It introduces custom resource definitions (CRDs) that model routing rules, circuit breaking, fault injection, traffic splitting, and other behaviors for non-HTTP protocols in a way that is aligned with how Istio manages HTTP and gRPC services. This allows platform and network teams to treat different protocols with a similar configuration workflow while preserving protocol semantics.

The framework uses Envoy (proxy and data plane) as the underlying traffic proxy and leverages Envoy’s filter and xDS configuration model to implement protocol-specific logic. Aeraki Mesh translates its CRDs into Envoy configurations that understand each protocol’s characteristics, enabling features such as method-level routing for Resource Provisioning Controller (RPC) systems, traffic mirroring, canary releases, and targeted observability for specific services or operations. This places Aeraki Mesh in the application networking and traffic management categories.

In enterprise environments, Aeraki Mesh is used to unify governance of polyglot microservices architectures where different teams adopt different RPC or messaging protocols. By integrating with Istio’s control plane and Kubernetes-native workflows, it allows operations teams to onboard Dubbo, Thrift, Redis, Kafka, and other protocol-based workloads into an existing mesh without replacing or rewriting the applications. The unified approach to traffic policy, security policy integration, and metrics collection supports consistent operational practices across diverse stacks.

From an ecosystem perspective, Aeraki Mesh aligns with CNCF-related technologies by running on Kubernetes and integrating with Istio and Envoy, which are widely used in cloud-native infrastructure. Its positioning in a technical directory fits under service mesh, application traffic management, and protocol-aware networking. The project is relevant for organizations that need to extend mesh governance beyond HTTP and gRPC, particularly in environments with mixed technology stacks and legacy or domain-specific protocols that require managed, observable, and policy-controlled network behavior.