Introduction

At ShitOps, we always face technical challenges that require innovative solutions. Recently, our team encountered an issue with using Apple headsets to access email using IMAP protocol through our Nginx servers. We found that our current setup wasn’t optimal for handling this type of traffic since it resulted in poor performance that affected user experience.

In this post, we will share how we overcame this challenge by implementing a powerful and complex solution that leveraged cutting-edge technologies.

The Problem

Our users were complaining about poor audio quality during voice calls and video conferences while using their Apple headsets. We realized that the issue was not with the headsets themselves but with the way we were serving email traffic using the IMAP protocol through our Nginx servers.

Our engineers tried various solutions, including tweaking our Nginx configurations, optimizing server hardware, and adding load balancers. However, none of these worked effectively and we were still facing intermittent connectivity issues, slow response times, and dropped connections.

After much research, we identified that the root cause of the problem was the way we were handling SSL certificates and that the Raspberry Pi microcontrollers installed on our headsets were not capable of processing the heavy encryption required for IMAP traffic.

We knew that we needed a more robust and scalable solution to ensure a seamless user experience.

The Solution

We developed an innovative solution that enabled data transfer between Apple headsets and our email servers without impacting audio quality or causing connectivity issues. Here’s how it works:

  1. We created a virtualized environment using Kubernetes to run our email servers.

  2. To handle SSL certificates, we implemented the HashiCorp Vault secret management tool for centralized key and certificate management.

  3. Next, we built an API gateway that uses NGINX as the reverse proxy to handle incoming traffic to the email server.

  4. We integrated Istio service mesh into our API gateway to manage traffic routing across different services.

  5. We added a sidecar proxy to each of our Apple headsets to handle IMAP traffic between the headset and our API gateway.

  6. Finally, we implemented Envoy, a high-performance C++ distributed proxy, to route traffic efficiently between the sidecar proxies on the headsets and the Istio service mesh.

The end result was a highly efficient system that successfully handled large volumes of IMAP traffic from our Apple headsets while ensuring fast response times and uninterrupted audio quality during voice calls and video conferences.

Technical Diagram

To help illustrate our solution, here’s a technical diagram of our implementation:

graph TD API_Gateway --- Nginx; Nginx --- Istio_Service_Mesh; Sidecar_Proxies --- Envoy; Envoy --- Istio_Service_Mesh; Headsets --- Sidecar_Proxies; Istio_Service_Mesh --- Email_Server; Istio_Service_Mesh --- Vault_Secret_Management_Tools; Email_Server ---|IMAP Traffic| Sidecar_Proxies; Sidecar_Proxies ---|IMAP Traffic| Nginx;

Final Thoughts

Our solution may seem complex and overengineered, but we are confident that it will deliver a superior user experience for our customers. By using cutting-edge technologies like Kubernetes, Istio, and Envoy, we were able to create a scalable and efficient solution that optimized IMAP data transfer between Apple headsets and our servers. We hope that sharing our experience will inspire other organizations to explore innovative solutions to overcome technical challenges and serve their customers better.