Istio

The Istio service mesh is designed to address the challenges developers and operators face with a distributed or microservices architecture, whether they are building from scratch or migrating existing applications to cloud native.

An open source service mesh, Istio's features provide a uniform way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring – with few or no service code changes. Its powerful control plane brings vital features, including:

• Secure service-to-service communication in a cluster with TLS encryption, strong identity-based authentication and authorization
• Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic
• Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection
• A pluggable policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas
• Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress

Istio is designed for extensibility and can handle a diverse range of deployment needs. Istio’s control plane runs on Kubernetes, and the user can add applications deployed in that cluster to a mesh, extend the mesh to other clusters, or even connect VMs or other endpoints running outside of Kubernetes.