The Dubbo Kubernetes Integration

⚠️ This is still an experimental version. ⚠️

The universal Control Plane and Console for managing microservices on any environment - VM and Kubernetes.

Quick Start (under development)

NOTICE: As the project has not been officially released yet, the following commands may not run properly. The best way for now is to refer to the Developer's Guide to learn how to download the source code and build it locally!

1. Download dubbo-control-plane binary package.

   curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/dubbo-kubernetes/master/release/downloadDubbo.sh | sh -
   
   cd dubbo-$version
   export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH
   

2. Install control-plane on Kubernetes

   dubboctl install --profile=demo
   

3. Check installation

   kubectl get services -n dubbo-system
   

4. Next, deploy Dubbo applications to Kubernetes as shown below:

   apiVersion: v1
   kind: Service
   metadata:
     name: demo-service
     namespace: dubbo-demo
   spec:
     selector:
       app: dubbo-demo
     type: ClusterIP
     ports:
       - name: port1
         protocol: http
         port: 80
         targetPort: 8080
   ---
   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
     name: example-app
     namespace: dubbo-demo
   spec:
     ...
     template:
       metadata:
         ...
         labels:
           app: dubbo-demo
           dubbo.apache.org/service: dubbo-demo
       spec:
         containers:
           ...
   

   If you want to create your own Dubbo application from scratch and deploy it, please use dubboctl we provided below.

5. Open the following page to check deployment status on control plane UI:

   kubectl port-forward svc/dubbo-control-plane \
     -n dubbo-system 5681:5681
   

   visit, 127.0.0.1:5681/admin

   

Architecture

The microservcice architecture built with Dubbo Control Plane consists of two main components:

• The Dubbo Control Plane configures the data plane - applications developed with Dubbo SDK, for handling service traffic. Users create policies that the dubbo control plane processes to generate configurations for the data plane.
• The data plane - the Dubbo SDK, connets directly to control plane and receives configurations that can work as the sources for service discovery, traffic routing, load balancing, etc.

Dubbo Control Plane supports two deployment modes: kubernetes and universal.

• kubernetes mode is like the classic Service Mesh architecture, with all microservices concepts bonded to kubernetes resources. Unlike classic service mesh solutions like istio, Dubbo favors a proxyless data plane deployment - with no envoy sidecar.
• universal is the traditional microservice architecture that all Dubbo users are already familiar with. Unlike the kubernetes mode, it usually needs a dedicated registry like Nacos or Zookeeper for service discovery, etc.

Kubernetes

In kubernetes mode, the control plane will interact directly with the Kubernetes API-SERVER, watching the kubernetes resources and transform them as xDS resources for service discovery and traffic management configurations.

We all know the service definitions of Kubernetes and Dubo are different, Kubernetes Service is more like an application concept run on a selected group of pods while Dubbo Service can mean a specific RPC service inside the application process. So how does dubbo control plane manages to bridge the interface-application gap, check here for more details.

Universal

In Universal mode, Dubbo still uses Nacos or Zookeeper as registries for service discovery, control plane then interact with registry directly to work as the console UI, as the entry point for viewing and managing the cluster.

Multiple clusters

Dubbo Control Plane supports running your services in multiple zones. It is even possible to run with a mix of Kubernetes and Universal zones. Your microservice environment can include multiple isolated services, and workloads running in different regions, on different clouds, or in different datacenters. A zone can be a Kubernetes cluster, a VPC, or any other deployment you need to include in the same distributed microservice environment. The only condition is that all the data planes running within the zone must be able to connect to the other data planes in this same zone.

Dubbo Control Plane supports a global deployment mode that can connect different zone region clusters. The picture below shows how it works.

Roadmap

• Security
• Metrics
• Cross-cluster communication
• Console

Refereces

• Dubboctl
• Console UI Design
• Dubbo java xDS implementation
• Dubbo go xDS implementation