Scenario

Application Mesh is a non-intrusive microservice governance solution that supports full-lifecycle management and traffic management such as load balancing.

Application Mesh involves Services and gateways:

• Services: A Service defines a set of instances and a means of accessing them. The Service name can be resolved to the corresponding IP address through which applications on edge nodes can access each other.
• Gateways: A gateway exposes edge applications deployed using IEF to external applications and forwards traffic through virtual services.

As shown in the following figure, if you access {IP address of the edge node where the gateway application is located}:{Gateway port}/URI, the traffic can be forwarded to the corresponding Service, which then forwards the traffic to the corresponding backend application instance.

Figure 1 Gateway traffic forwarding path

Built on the KubeEdge ecosystem, IEF extends the orchestration capabilities of cloud native containerized applications to the edge. However, in edge computing scenarios, the network topology is complex, and edge nodes in different regions usually are not connected with each other. To meet the requirement of traffic interworking between applications, IEF is compatible with community application meshes and can deliver Service and gateway metadata. Before using these functions, you need to deploy the community application EdgeMesh on edge nodes. For details, see https://github.com/kubeedge/edgemesh/.