Delix

The idea behind delix is the create an overlay network that connects microservices. It uses semantic addressing and takes care of encryption, fail-over and load balancing.

Installation

cargo install delix

Example

Run three delix nodes in three different terminals.

delix -c example/one.conf.toml
delix -c example/two.conf.toml
delix -c example/three.conf.toml

The node one opens an interface at 127.0.0.1:4200 which take http requests. All nodes have the service slashdot configured. In order to request a response from the service run...

curl -H 'Host: slashdot.org' -H 'X-Delix-Service: slashdot' http://127.0.0.1:4200

Let's dive into the config file of node one.

[log]
type = "console"
level = "debug"

[metric]
type = "terminal"
refresh_interval_ms = 100

[cipher]
type = "symmetric"
key = "000102030405060708090a0b0c0d0e0f"

[discovery]
type = "constant"
addresses = [ ]

[transport]
type = "direct"
local_address = "localhost:4001"
request_timeout_ms = 5000
balancer = { type = "dynamic_round_robin" }

[[relay]]
type = "http"
address = "localhost:4200"
header_field = "X-Delix-Service"

[[relay.service]]
name = "slashdot"
address = "slashdot.org:80"

The discovery section contains the field addresses which holds a list of IPs (with ports) that is used during the node's boot up to search for other nodes. Since node one is the first, the list is empty here.

In the cipher section is the key defined for the encryption and authentication of the traffic between nodes. The key can be 16, 24 or 32 bytes (hex encoded) long and will issue a AES-{128, 192 or 256}-GCM encryption. All nodes in the network must share the same key.

In order to bind a node to an interface, local_address in the transport section must be set. If the interface differs from the interface visible to other nodes, the field public_address can be set.

The relay section at the end, defines here a http relay that opens a port at address that takes HTTP requests. The header_field in the request tells delix to which service the request should be routed to. The services are defined in the relay.service section and define a name and an address which defines the endpoint where the request is send. In this example it's the slashdot server.

License

The code is licensed under Apache 2.0.