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The Extensible Service Proxy

Extensible Service Proxy, a.k.a. ESP is a proxy which enables API management capabilities for JSON/REST or gRPC API services. The current implementation is based on an NGINX HTTP reverse proxy server.

ESP provides:

  • Features: authentication (auth0, gitkit), API key validation, JSON to gRPC transcoding, as well as API-level monitoring, tracing and logging. More features coming in the near future: quota, billing, ACL, etc.

  • Easy Adoption: the API service can be implemented in any coding language using any IDLs.

  • Platform flexibility: support the deployment on any cloud or on-premise environment.

  • Superb performance and scalability: low latency and high throughput

ESP can Run Anywhere

However, the initial development was done on Google App Engine Flexible Environment, GCE and GKE for API services using Open API Specification and so our instructions and samples are focusing on these platforms. If you make it work on other infrastructure and IDLs please let us know and contribute instructions/code.

Prerequisites

Common prerequisites used irrespective of operating system and build tool chain are:

Getting ESP

To download the Extensible Service Proxy source code, clone the ESP repository:

# Clone ESP repository
git clone https://github.com/cloudendpoints/esp

# Initialize Git submodules.
git -C esp submodule update --init --recursive

Released ESP docker images

ESP docker images are released regularly. The regular images are named as gcr.io/endpoints-release/endpoints-runtime:MAJOR_VERSION.MINOR_VERSION.PATCH_NUMBER. For example, gcr.io/endpoints-release/endpoints-runtime:1.30.0 has MAJOR_VERSION=1, MINOR_VERSION=30 and PATCH_NUMBER=0.

Symbolically linked images:

  • MAJOR_VERSION is linked to the latest image with same MAJOR_VERSION.

For example, gcr.io/endpoints-release/endpoints-runtime:1 is always pointed to the latest image with "1" major version.

Secure image:

Normally ESP container runs as root, it is deemed as not secure. To make ESP container secure, it should be run as non-root and its root file system should be read-only. Normal docker images can be made to run as non-root, but such change may break some existing users. Starting 1.31.0, a new secure image is built with suffix "-secure" in the image name, e.g. gcr.io/endpoints-release/endpoints-runtime-secure:1.31.0. It will be run as non-root.

You can switch to use the secure images if the followings are satisfied:

  • Nginx is not listening on ports requiring root privilege (ports < 1024).
  • If a custom nginx config is used and it has the server_config path set to "/etc/nginx", the secure image will not work. The server_config is moved to the "/home/nginx" folder in the secure image. Please replace "/etc/nginx" with "/home/nginx" for *sever_config" in your custom nginx config before using the secure image.

If some folders can be mounted externally, the root system can be made read-only. Please see this GKE deployment yaml file as example on how to make root system read-only.

Repository Structure

  • doc: Documentation
  • docker: Scripts for packaging ESP in a Docker image.
  • include: Extensible Service Proxy header files.
  • src: Extensible Service Proxy source.
  • google and third_party: Git submodules containing dependencies of ESP, including NGINX.
  • script: Scripts used for build, test, and continuous integration.
  • test: Applications and client code used for end-to-end testing.
  • tools: Assorted tooling.
  • start_esp: A Python start-up script for the ESP proxy. The script includes a generic nginx configuration template and fetching logic to retrieve service configuration from Google Service Management service.

ESP Tutorial

To find out more about building, running, and testing ESP, please review

Contributing

Your contributions are welcome. Please follow the contributor guidlines.