Adoption & Ecosystem

Who uses it

The repository has no dedicated ADOPTERS file; user collection happens in issue #105 (README.md:169). The organisations below each have a citable source.

Organisation	Use case	Source
Tencent Music	Ran Istio + Aeraki in production, presented at IstioCon 2022	IstioCon 2022 session
Tencent	Maintainer Xunzhuo from Tencent; tRPC, qza, and videoPacket listed as supported MetaProtocol protocols	MAINTAINERS.md, README.md:92-94

The README also names Alauda and bRPC (open-sourced by Baidu) among supported MetaProtocol protocols (README.md:91,95), which signals usage but is not a direct adoption statement. No other named adopters have a confirming source, so none are claimed here.

Adoption signals

Measured from the GitHub API on 2026-06-26:

• Stars: 761
• Forks: 141
• Contributors: about 34 (non-anonymous)
• Open issues: 21
• Last push: 2025-12-05
• Archived: no
• License: Apache-2.0
• Created: 2020-11-05

Ecosystem

Aeraki is one repository in a set of sibling projects under the same organisation:

• meta-protocol-proxy: the C++ Envoy filter data plane that pairs with Aeraki.
• api and client-go: shared API types and generated client, both Aeraki dependencies (go.mod).
• meta-protocol-control-plane-api: the control-plane API definitions.
• aerakictl: a debugging command-line tool.
• website: the project documentation site.

Aeraki integrates with Istio (required, over MCP over xDS via internal/controller/istio/controller.go) and Envoy (through the generated EnvoyFilter resources). Version compatibility is strict: Aeraki 1.4.x targets Istio 1.18.x and MetaProtocol Proxy 1.4.x per the install docs.

Alternatives

Alternative	Differs by
Plain Istio with hand-written EnvoyFilter	Possible, but you implement the filter and routing per protocol; Aeraki reduces the work to a MetaProtocol codec (README.md:72).
Istio native Dubbo/Thrift/MySQL/MongoDB/Redis filters	Inline routes only, so connections break on route change; no dynamic RDS (README.md:50). Aeraki ships a dynamic RDS for MetaProtocol.
Cilium / Linkerd	L7 handling is centred on HTTP and gRPC; declarative routing for Dubbo, Thrift, or proprietary RPC is out of scope. Aeraki's distinction is adding arbitrary request/response L7 protocols by writing a codec.