What’s New in Aeraki Mesh 1.3.0? Istio 1.16 Support, Multiplexing, and MetaProtocol Features

Release Overview

Aeraki Mesh 1.3.0, released on June 24, 2023 (code name “Dragonboat”), brings major new capabilities such as support for Istio 1.16.x, connection multiplexing, MetaProtocol support on gateways, enhanced Dubbo service governance, Redis traffic management, and a move of official Docker images to GitHub Packages.

New Logo

The project adopted a CNCF‑designed logo to replace the previous one due to copyright concerns. The new logo is now used across the GitHub repository and the official website.

Istio 1.16.x Support

From version 1.3.0, Aeraki Mesh aligns with Istio 1.16.x.

Version 1.2.x enters maintenance mode and will only receive critical fixes.

Connection Multiplexing (Alpha)

Previously, each request created a separate upstream connection, leading to a number of connections proportional to concurrent requests. The 1.3.0 release adds an alpha‑stage multiplexing mechanism that caches upstream connection data in the Connection Manager, allowing multiple logical streams over a single physical connection.

To enable multiplexing on the data plane, set the multiplexing field of meta_protocol_proxy to true:

name: aeraki.meta_protocol_proxy
  typed_config:
    '@type': type.googleapis.com/aeraki.meta_protocol_proxy.v1alpha.MetaProtocolProxy
    protocol:
      name: dubbo
      codec:
        name: aeraki.meta_protocol.codec.dubbo
      multiplexing: true

Gateway MetaProtocol Support

The gateway now supports Layer‑7 routing for MetaProtocol traffic. The gateways field in MetaRouter lets you define routing rules for services such as Thrift.

---
apiVersion: metaprotocol.aeraki.io/v1alpha1
kind: MetaRouter
metadata:
  name: test-metaprotocol-thrift-route
  namespace: meta-thrift
spec:
  gateways:
    - istio-system/istio-ingressgateway
  hosts:
    - thrift-sample-server.meta-thrift.svc.cluster.local
  routes:
    - route:
        - destination:
            host: thrift-sample-server.meta-thrift.svc.cluster.local
            port:
              number: 9090
            subset: v1

Dubbo Service Governance

Aeraki Mesh now offers two granularity levels for Dubbo service governance:

Application‑level (process): fewer Service objects, lower control‑plane load, but no fine‑grained traffic controls.

Interface‑level : enables gray releases, rate limiting, traffic mirroring per Interface, at the cost of more Service objects and higher control‑plane resource usage.

Choose the level based on the size of your Dubbo deployment: large applications with many Interfaces benefit from application‑level governance, while smaller deployments can leverage interface‑level for precise control.

Further details are available in the official documentation.

Redis Traffic Management

Aeraki Mesh provides advanced Redis traffic management, including transparent Redis Cluster sharding, read/write splitting, traffic mirroring, and fault injection, all without requiring client changes.

Refer to the Redis tutorial for configuration examples.

Official Image Registry Migration

The official Docker images have moved from Docker Hub to GitHub Packages.

Control‑plane image: ghcr.io/aeraki-mesh/aeraki[:TAG] Data‑plane images:

ghcr.io/aeraki-mesh/meta-protocol-proxy[:TAG]

ghcr.io/aeraki-mesh/meta-protocol-proxy-debug[:TAG]

ghcr.io/aeraki-mesh/meta-protocol-proxy-distroless[:TAG]

Full Change Log

Aeraki

Add gateways field in CRD and proto (PR #302)

Support MetaProtocol at gateway (PR #304)

Application‑level routing for Dubbo (PR #306‑#307)

Update Kubernetes registry references (PR #312)

Add uninstall script (PR #324)

Switch to GitHub image hub (PR #317)

Update annotations (PR #325)

Ingress‑gateway can share port with business service (PR #318)

Support specified namespace (PR #326)

Make Aeraki address configurable (PR #327)

Add license scan report (PR #329)

Code optimizations and multi‑arch image support (PR #331‑#333)

Remove configmap on uninstall (PR #334)

Use metaprotocol‑generator (PR #337)

Fix various bugs and add health checks (PR #343‑#355)

MetaProtocolProxy

Fix build issues (PR #96)

Add multiplexing config (PR #97, #101)

License scan updates (PR #103)

Bug fixes for Dubbo proxy and metadata handling (PR #106‑#110)

References

Aeraki Mesh website: https://aeraki.net

Aeraki Mesh GitHub: https://github.com/aeraki-mesh