IBM Cloud Managed Istio vs. NGINX Ingress Controller

Clearly, the [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] tool is very useful when you have multiple services and each service is connecting with other services through APIs in different networks. To manage this type of complex network, [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] is very useful. It comes with a license that can increase the billing of your project so make sure if your application network mesh, monitoring cannot be managed on your own then you can use it. If your application is not very complex then you have many tools available like Grafana, Prometheus, Sumo Logic, which you can integrate individually with your cluster and implement. In this type of scenario, it is better to not use [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] and it will serve your purpose as well.

Incentivized

Best suited if we have to manage external traffic inside your Kubernetes cluster and want to use granular control to your applications.

Incentivized

• Layers transparently onto existing applications
• Allows control of access and rules to be developed
• Creates metrics for usage

Incentivized

• Provide access to containers
• Manage traffic
• Route traffic
• Lightweight
• Near to zero downtime

Incentivized

• Some more functionalities added could improve it better.
• Better technical user guidance.

Incentivized

• Its not related to Ingress functionality but certificate management with cloud vendor would be a feature i would like to see.

Incentivized

Training and usage support available

Incentivized

We are already using NGINX which is so reliable, it definitely lends weight to our decision to select NGINX Ingress Controller. Also, even though it is a little more complex to manage, NGINX Ingress Controller definitely have a richer feature set, better performance, caching, traffic management among other features which was why it was chosen.

Incentivized

• It reduced the complexity of network mesh (ingress/egress services).
• One tool with many solutions. No need to integrate monitoring tools or notification tools.
• It reduced the number of lines of YAML code.
• It reduced the number of labor hours.

Incentivized

• Security is one of the best objective which we achieve with NGINX Ingress
• Cost optimization is one of the business objective

Incentivized