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Envoy xDS subsystem

Overview

Envoy implements the xDS protocol. This document tracks some implementation details.

tl;dr: xDS can use the filesystem, REST or gRPC. gRPC xDS comes in four flavors. However, Envoy code uses all of that via the same Subscription interface. If you are an Envoy developer with your hands on a valid Subscription object, you can mostly forget the filesystem/REST/gRPC distinction, and you can especially forget about the gRPC flavors.

An overview of the architecture is provided in the diagram below:

xDS implementation architecture overview

Note that this is currently somewhat idealized, with Envoy having two gRPC mux implementations, GrpcMuxImpl and NewGrpcMuxImpl, while we complete migration to a single muxer, see envoyproxy#11477.

The key components are:

  • GrpcMuxImpl which manages the xDS transport and multiplexing one or more subscriptions on a single gRPC stream. The muxer is responsible for managing the wire level concerns via GrpcStream, while also tracking subscription state and watchers for updates. Multiple resource type URLs may be managed by a single muxer. For non-ADS, this will always be one stream per subscription, whereas for ADS, multiple subscriptions will be multiplexed on a single stream.
  • SubscriptionState tracks subscription state for a single resource type URL.
  • WatchMap tracks all the subscribers for a given resource type.
  • Each Envoy subsystem, e.g. LDS, CDS, etc. has a GrpcSubscriptionImpl that points at a GrpcMuxImpl.

The above components are responsible for subscriptions, watches, muxing and stream management. Caching is not currently a centralized service, and is instead delegated to per-resource type modules such as RdsRouteConfigProviderImpl.

Note that there can be multiple active gRPC subscriptions for a single resource type. This concept is called "resource watches". If one EDS subscription subscribes to X and Y, and another subscribes to Y and Z, the underlying subscription logic will maintain a subscription to the union: X Y and Z. Updates to X will be delivered to the first object, Y to both, Z to the second. This logic is implemented by WatchMap.

xdstp:// naming

In addition, Envoy is currently implementing a new structured naming scheme aimed to support better scalability, cacheability, federation and reliability, see envoyproxy#11264. This introduces new requirements on the xDS transport; it needs to manage subscriptions to new forms of resource collections and provide contextual information in resource name subscriptions.

To support this, the Envoy's LocalInfo owns a Config::ContextProvider, providing all node specific context parameters required for xdstp:// naming. This is consumed by GrpcMuxImpl. In addition, GrpcMuxImpl and WatchMap are aware of this naming scheme and implement the expected match semantics and naming schemes.

Implementation is in progress and we support the following aspects of xdstp:// today:

  • LDS glob collections over ADS.
  • LDS filesystem list collections featuring inline resources.

It should be noted that xdstp:// support is experimental at this time while we complete implementation.

xdstp:// support will only be added for delta xDS.

gRPC xDS internals

When using gRPC, xDS has two pairs of options:

  • Aggregated vs. non-aggregated
  • Delta vs. State-of-the-World (SotW) updates.

All four combinations of these are usable.

Aggregated means that EDS, CDS, etc resources are all carried by the same gRPC stream. For Envoy's implementation of xDS client logic, there is effectively no difference between aggregated xDS and non-aggregated: they both use the same request/response protos. The non-aggregated case is handled by the aggregated logic, by just happening to only have 1 xDS subscription type to aggregate, i.e., NewGrpcMuxImpl only has one DeltaSubscriptionState entry in its map.

However, to the config server, there is a significant difference: when using ADS (i.e. when the user provides an ads_config in the bootstrap config), the gRPC client sets its method string to {Delta,Stream}AggregatedResources, as opposed to {Delta,Stream}Clusters, {Delta,Stream}Routes, etc. So, despite using the same request/response protos, and having identical client code, they're actually different gRPC services.

Delta vs. SotW is a question of wire format: the protos in question are named [Delta]Discovery{Request,Response}. That is what the GrpcMux interface is useful for: its NewGrpcMuxImpl (TODO may be renamed) implementation works with DeltaDiscovery{Request,Response} and has delta-specific logic; its GrpxMuxImpl implementation (TODO will be merged into NewGrpcMuxImpl) works with Discovery{Request,Response} and has SotW-specific logic. Both the delta and SotW Subscription implementations (TODO will be merged) hold a shared_ptr<GrpcMux>. The shared_ptr allows for both non- and aggregated: if non-aggregated, you'll be the only holder of that shared_ptr.