Project: Service Mesh Performance (Orchestration & Management / Service Mesh)
File: 2022-01-26-pipelining-service-mesh-specifications.md

slug: Pipelining Service Mesh Specifications layout: post subtitle: Using SMI and SMP specs on your CI/CD pipelines with Meshery's GitHub Actions author: The Newsroom image: /assets/img/buttons/smp-logo/smp-new-logo.png alt: published: true date: 2022-1-26 12:15:05 +0000 category: spec caption: title: Pipelining Service Mesh Specifications subtitle: Using SMI and SMP specs on your CI/CD pipelines with Meshery's GitHub Actions thumbnail: /assets/img/blogs/service-mesh-specifications.png With growing adoption of service meshes in cloud native environments, service mesh abstractions - service mesh-neutral specifications - have emerged. Service Mesh Performance and <a href="https://layer5.io/projects/service-mesh-interface-conformance">Service Mesh Interface</a> are two open specifications that address the need for universal interfaces for interacting with and managing any type of service mesh. Lets examine what each specification provides. Service Mesh Performance standardizes service mesh value measurement, characterizing any deployment's performance by capturing the details of infrastructure capacity, service mesh configuration and workload metadata. Service Mesh Interface provides a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes. These (currently) four specfications offer a common denominator set of interfaces to support most common service mesh use cases and the flexibility to evolve to support new service mesh capabilities over time. As a service mesh agnostic tool that provides lifecycle and performance management of a large number of (10+) service meshes, Kubernetes applications, service mesh patterns and WebAssembly filters, Meshery is the ideal tool for the job when it comes to implementing these specifications. Meshery also comes with two new GitHub Actions that do exactly this. The <a href="https://github.com/layer5io/meshery-smi-conformance-action">Meshery SMI Conformance Action</a> which validates <a href="https://meshery.io/blog/validating-smi-conformance-with-meshery">SMI conformance in your pipeline</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/layer5io/meshery-smp-action">Meshery SMP Action</a> which runs <a href="SMP compatible performance benchmarks">SMP compatible performance benchmarks</a>. But how do we use these actions? What do they offer? Lets find out! Conformance of SMI specifications is defined as a series of test assertions. These test assertions are categorised by SMI specification (of which, there are currently four specifications) and comprise the complete suite of SMI conformance tests. Conformance requirements will change appropriately as each new version of the SMI spec is released. Refer to Meshery's documentation for details of how <a href="https://docs.meshery.io/functionality/service-mesh-interface">Meshery performs SMI conformance.</a> Using Meshery's SMI Conformance GitHub Action The <a href="https://github.com/marketplace/actions/service-mesh-interface-conformance-with-meshery">Service Mesh Interface Conformance GitHub Action</a> is available in the GitHub Marketplace. You can configure this action to trigger with each of your releases, on every pull request. or any GitHub workflow trigger event. An example of the action configuration which runs on every release is shown below. The action handles setting up a Kubernetes environment, deploying the service mesh (see supported service meshes), running the conformance tests and reporting back the results to the SMI Conformance dashboard in Meshery. <div class="codewrapper"> <pre><code> name: SMI Conformance with Meshery on: push: tags: 'v*' jobs: smi-conformance: name: SMI Conformance runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: name: SMI conformance tests uses: layer5io/mesheryctl-smi-conformance-action@master with: providertoken: ${{

}} servicemesh: openservice_mesh mesh_deployed: false </code></pre></div> You can also bring in their own cluster with specific capabilities and with a service mesh already installed. <div class="codewrapper"> <pre><code> name: SMI Conformance with Meshery on: push: branches: 'master' jobs: smi-conformance: name: SMI Conformance tests on master runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: name: Deploy k8s-minikube uses: manusa/actions-setup-minikube@v2.4.1 with: minikube version: 'v1.21.0' kubernetes version: 'v1.20.7' driver: docker name: Install OSM run: | curl -LO https://github.com/openservicemesh/ osm/releases/download/v0.9.1/osm-v0.9.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz tar -xzf osm-v0.9.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz mkdir -p ~/osm/bin mv ./linux-amd64/osm ~/osm/bin/osm-bin PATH="$PATH:$HOME/osm/bin/" osm-bin install --osm-namespace default name: SMI conformance tests uses: layer5io/mesheryctl-smi-conformance-action@master with: providertoken: ${{ secrets.MESHERYPROVIDER_TOKEN }} servicemesh: openservice_mesh mesh_deployed: true </code></pre></div> You can download a token from Meshery and add it as a GitHub secret (in the example above, the secret is MESHERYPROVIDERTOKEN). After the test is run, you can view the results from the Service Mesh Interface dashboard in Meshery UI. <div style="text-align:center;margin-bottom:2rem;width:100%"> <img width="90%" src="/assets/img/blogs/smi-conformance-result.png" alt="smi conformance dashboard"> </div> Participating service mesh projects can also <a href="https://docs.meshery.io/functionality/service-mesh-interface#reporting-conformance">automatically report their conformance test results</a> to the <a href="https://meshery.io/service-mesh-interface">SMI Conformance dashboard</a> Measuring and managing the performance of a service mesh is key to efficient operation of any service mesh. Meshery is the canonical implementation of the Service Mesh Performance specification. You can choose from multiple load generators and use a highly configurable set of load profiles with variable tunable facets to run a performance test. Meshery packages all these features into an easy-to-use GitHub Action. Using Meshery's Service Mesh Performance GitHub Action The <a href="https://github.com/marketplace/actions/performance-testing-with-meshery">Service Mesh Performance GitHub Action</a> is available in the GitHub Marketplace.You can create your own performance profiles to run repeatable tests with Meshery. You can configure this action to trigger with each of your releases, on every pull request. or any GitHub workflow trigger event. A sample configuration of the action is shown below. <div class="codewrapper"> <pre><code> name: Meshery SMP Action on: push: branches: 'master' jobs: performance-test: name: Performance Test runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: name: checkout uses: actions/checkout@v2 with: ref: 'perf' name: Deploy k8s-minikube uses: manusa/actions-setup-minikube@v2.4.1 with: minikube version: 'v1.21.0' kubernetes version: 'v1.20.7' driver: docker name: Run Performance Test uses: layer5io/meshery-smp-action@master with: providertoken: ${{ secrets.PROVIDERTOKEN }} platform: docker profile_name: soak-test </code></pre></div> You can also define your test configuration in an SMP compatible configuration file as shown below. <div class="codewrapper"> <pre><code> smp_version: v0.0.1 id: name: Istio Performance Test labels: {} clients: internal: false load_generator: fortio protocol: 1 connections: 2 rps: 10 headers: {} cookies: {} body: "" content_type: "" endpoint_urls: http://localhost:2323/productpage duration: "30m" </code></pre></div> See this sample GitHub workflow (<a href="https://github.com/layer5io/meshery-smp-action/blob/master/action.yml">action.yml</a>) for more configuration details. <div style="text-align:center;margin-bottom:2rem;width:100%"> <img width="90%" src="/assets/img/blogs/service-mesh-performance-profile-test-results.png" alt="performance management dashboard"> </div> The results from the tests are updated on the Performance Management dashboard in Meshery. To learn more about interpreting the test results, check out <a href="https://docs.meshery.io/guides/interpreting-performance-test-results">this guide</a>. You can always checkout the <a href="https://docs.meshery.io/guides">Meshery User Guides</a> to dive deep into these features. Stay meshy! {% include related-discussion.html tag="SMP"%}