The objective of the xDS API Working Group (xDS-WG) is to bring together parties across the industry interested in a common control and configuration API for data plane proxies and load balancers, based on the xDS APIs.

The xDS vision is one of a universal data plane API, articulated at https://blog.envoyproxy.io/the-universal-data-plane-api-d15cec7a. xDS aims to provide a set of APIs that provide the de facto standard for L4/L7 data plane configuration, similar to the role played by OpenFlow at L2/L3/L4 in SDN.

The existing Envoy xDS APIs constitute the basis for this vision and will incrementally evolve towards supporting a goal of client neutrality. We will evolve the xDS APIs to support additional clients, for example data plane proxies beyond Envoy, proxyless service mesh libraries, hardware load balancers, mobile clients and beyond. We will strive to be vendor and implementation agnostic to the degree possible while not regressing on support for data plane components that have committed to xDS in production (Envoy & gRPC to date).

The xDS APIs have two delineated aspects, a transport protocol and data model, The xDS transport protocol provides a low latency versioned streaming gRPC delivery of xDS resources. The data model covers common data plane concerns such as service discovery, load balancing assignments, routing discovery, listener configuration, secret discovery, load reporting, health check delegation, etc.

The xDS APIs are split between this repository and https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/tree/main/api. Our long-term goal is to move the entire API to this repository, this will be done opportunistically over time as we generalize parts of the API to be less client-specific.

We have an open mailing list xds-wg@lists.cncf.io for communication and announcements. We also meet on an ad hoc basis via Zoom.

To monitor activity, you can either subscribe to a GitHub watch on this repository or join the @cncf/xds-wg team for tagging on key PRs and RFCs.