Fence is an open source project to automate the management of Istio custom resources Sidecar.

When there are too many services in the Service Mesh, the Envoy configuration is too large and new applications remain in Not Ready state for a long time. For this reason, Ops needs to manage the custom resource Sidecar and manually configure service dependencies for the application.

Fence has the ability to automatically fetch service dependencies and provide automatic management of the custom resource Sidecar.

In a Kubenetes cluster with 250 pods, the XDS Response Bytes Max peaks at 450 kB/s and the Proxy Push Time peaks at 20s before Fence is enabled, and the XDS Response Bytes Max peaks at 27 kB/s and the Proxy Push Time peaks at 5s after Fence is enabled. In summary, enabling Fence to automatically manage Sidecar resources reduces the XDS Response Bytes Max peak by about 94% and the Proxy Push Time peak by about 75%.

Before Fence is enabled

After Fence is enabled

Use kubectl

kubectl create namespace fence
kubectl apply -f "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hexiaodai/fence/0.1.0/deploy/fence.yaml"

Use helm

helm install fence --create-namespace -n fence oci://registry-1.docker.io/hejianmin/chart-fence --version 0.1.0

Fence has two ways to automate the management of custom resource Sidecars in a cluster:

Note: Fence does not manage Sidecar in the system namespace kube-system, istio-system.

• Manage the entire cluster, this is the default behavior

kubectl -n fence set env deployment/fence AUTO_FENCE="true"

• Specify a Namespace or Pod to manage

kubectl -n fence set env deployment/fence AUTO_FENCE="false"
# Namespace
kubectl label namespace ${namespace name} sidecar.fence.io=enabled
# Pod
kubectl label pods ${pod name} sidecar.fence.io=enabled

• Specify a Namespace or Pod that does not need to be managed

# Namespace
kubectl label namespace ${namespace name} sidecar.fence.io=disable
# Pod
kubectl label pods ${pod name} sidecar.fence.io=disable