Recently, Microsoft announced the open source lightweight service mesh (Service Mesh) project Open Service Mesh (OSM) , and emphasized that it will donate the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as soon as possible.
And just last month, Google violated the agreement with IBM, refused to donate its famous open source service grid project Istio to CNCF, and established a new organization to transfer the trademark ownership of Istio and other projects. Unanimously protested.
In contrast, Microsoft’s emphasis on donating OSM is indeed intriguing.
The difference between OSM and Istio
On August 6, Microsoft announced the open source of OSM, a lightweight service mesh project based on Envoy proxy. According to Gabe Monroy, product director of Microsoft’s cloud service platform Azure, OSM is designed as an implementation of the service grid unified interface standard SMI, while using Envoy as the proxy and bus.
When asked about the difference between OSM and Istio, Gabe said that the main difference is that OSM is lighter. “Many of our customers are trying to use Istio, but from the support queue of AKS (Azure K8s Service), we can see that many users have encountered difficulties in the process of using Istio.”
Gabe believes that the complexity of Istio itself has become a learning burden for many enterprise user developers. “Istio’s design philosophy is to try to integrate the entire Envoy ecosystem, which generates a large number of complex APIs. But most users who use Service Mesh actually only pay attention to three things: secure communication between services, intelligent routing, and services between services. The automatic monitoring of Istio. Istio’s complex functions are often not used. In fact, these unnecessary complexities also increase the probability of failure of the container cluster.”
Although OSM is called lightweight, it does not mean that it lacks capabilities. Gebe said that OSM was carefully designed and only retained some of the APIs that users most needed. “We want OSM to be simple and easy to understand (compared to Istio). This comes at a price. The price is the accessibility of some advanced features. We enable these advanced features by creating a bail-out mechanism for the native Envoy API instead of Do more articles at the API level.”
Service Grid Unified Interface Standard SMI
The SMI mentioned by Gebe is the abbreviation of Service Mesh Interface proposed by Microsoft last year.
In May 2019, at the KubeCon 2019 summit hosted by CNCF, Microsoft and CNCF jointly launched Service Mesh Interface (SMI), a service mesh specification running on K8s, which defines a set of objects with limited description capabilities for The control of the service grid aims to provide a unified interface standard for existing and future service grid products of different vendors. The emergence of SMI has made lightweight service grid products a mainstream trend. The official CNCF project Linkerd is a lightweight service grid product based on SMI.
SMI defines API standards for the four modules of traffic specification, access control, traffic splitting, and traffic monitoring in the service grid, avoiding market fragmentation, and giving new vendors the compatibility to join the service mesh ecosystem.
At that time, the vendors that joined the standard included many well-known open source companies and CNCF Foundation members, including Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft, Canonical, Docker, etc., but Google, a founding member of CNCF, was not on the list, which was surprising. You know, Google maintains Istio, the Service Mesh product with the largest market share at the time.
It seems that from this time on, Google plans not to play with everyone.
Dragon-slaying warrior finally becomes evil dragon?
From the “three major papers” on the basis of cloud computing technology, the browser kernel Chromium, and the Andorid system, to today’s Kubernetes, which unifies the construction of cloud-native infrastructure, Google has always been a leader in the open source field, and launched one after another enough to change The world’s heavyweight open source project. But in recent years, Google’s attitude towards the open source community seems to be undergoing subtle changes.
Last October, in a high-level strategy report published by Google, Donna Malayeri, Google’s product manager and member of the Knative project steering committee, made it clear that the Knative project (based on Kubernetes and Istio’s Serverless architecture) will not be donated to any foundation. This decision also attracted the dissatisfaction of many people in the industry. VMWare chief engineer Joe Beda and Microsoft engineer Brendan Burns (former Google Kubernetes chief engineer) and others all expressed disappointment at this news.
And just last month, Google violated the agreement reached during the joint development of the Istio project with IBM and refused to donate Istio to the neutral CNCF. Instead, it transferred the trademark rights of three important open source projects, including Istio, to a company. A new organization created by Google’s top executives. This move also aroused dissatisfaction among relevant ecological participants such as IBM, Oracle, CNCF, Istio community, and representatives of all parties publicly accused Google of violating the spirit of open governance of the open source community.
We have analyzed that Google’s conservative moves in the open source field in recent years may be more driven by market pressure. According to a report released by the research organization Synergy Research, in the global cloud service market in Q1 2020, Google Cloud’s market share is only 8%, far behind AWS and Microsoft Azure. As the de facto standard for the construction of global cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes from Google has not only failed to bring corresponding benefits to Google, but has made competitors earn a lot of money.
Google now wants to control important open source projects such as Istio in its own hands, it seems that it does not want to repeat the mistake of completely neutral and open Kubernetes being sucked by competitors.
Open source Microsoft
Contrary to Google’s “great retreat” in the open source field, the once “closed devil” Microsoft has aggressively attacked open source in recent years.
In 2001, the then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer uttered the famous anti-open source slogan: “From the perspective of intellectual property protection, Linux is an incurable cancer.”
And 13 years later, when Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella took office, he publicly expressed Microsoft’s “love” for Linux and open source. Although many people thought that this was just Microsoft’s new marketing method, Microsoft’s subsequent actions have proved that it has indeed invested a lot of energy in the open source field.
Since the new CEO took office, Microsoft has open sourced its important projects including .NET, launched free and open source Visual Studio Code, fully supported Linux cross-platform operation, and joined or participated in the establishment of various open source organizations. In 2016, Microsoft became the company that contributed the most code to the open source community in the world. In 2018, Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire GitHub, further consolidating its position in the open source world.
Of course, Microsoft’s move to embrace open source has indeed paid off. In the 2019 Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey Report, Microsoft’s VS Code has become the world’s most popular development platform. Facebook officially announced that VS Code has become the default internal development environment. A very large proportion of Google engineers have also begun to use VS Code. A series of open source tool chains built by Microsoft around VS Code have also become the biggest winner in the global developer market.
Microsoft, which has tasted the sweetness of open source, is also working hard in the cloud native field. In 2017, Microsoft joined CNCF as a platinum member and became one of the important contributors to the Kubernetes ecosystem. Azure, a cloud service provider under Microsoft, also launched the AKS business based on Kubernetes, becoming the world’s second largest hybrid cloud service provider, with a market share that surpassed Google, the creator of Kubernetes.
Now, seeing the market shaken by Google for Istio’s proprietary manufacturing, Microsoft has decisively launched OSM in an attempt to enter the Service Mesh market to take a share.
Identity swap
Google is getting more and more closed, and Microsoft is getting more and more open? This was absolutely unbelievable ten years ago, but now it seems to be becoming a reality.
The commentary believes that for its own business interests, Google chose to abandon the CNCF that it had personally supported, and did not hesitate to violate the agreement to control Istio in its own hands; and Microsoft also chose to embrace CNCF for its own business interests and launched OSM to seize Istio’s market share.
Perhaps this is the case, whether it is Google or Microsoft, for these commercial companies, there is no eternal position, only eternal interests. From a historical perspective, this game of identity interchange seems to never end…
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