Overview
What is Istio?
Istio is an open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. 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.
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Product Demos
How to Use Istio Ingress Gateway
Keycloak with istio envoy jwt-auth proxy
Service Mesh: Crash Course on ISTIO (Part 2)
Istio demo: Multi-cluster Istio Operations
Istio Ingress Gateway vs. Kubernetes Ingress Demo
Istio - The Packet's-Eye View - Matt Turner, Tetrate
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
What is Istio?
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 Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Reviews
Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Users have reported that Istio has helped to solve several business problems related to microservices, including canary releases, traffic management, service discovery, scalability, segmentation, security access control and monitoring. The product has provided several benefits such as zero code for logging and monitoring, great service mesh, flexibility with custom Ingress controller, resiliency, easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker while also offering full security and powerful authorization mechanisms.
In addition to addressing the issues of securing communication among services and exposing services using the ingress gateway, users have found that Istio has eliminated the need for paid WAF tools while replacing load balancer and nginx-ingress. Setting up Istio with Kubernetes deployment is easy and it has helped to reduce the deployment time process by 50%. Users have also utilized Istio for deploying models and for setting up the traffic, canary deployment, better session affinity, and impact analysis. Overall, users have found that using Istio has greatly improved production level performance while providing better security features for their microservices.
Traffic management: Reviewers have consistently praised Istio's traffic management capabilities, with many stating that it is a standout feature. According to users, Istio offers a range of traffic management features such as rate limiting, circuit breaking, and request routing that are easy to use and help improve network performance.
Pre-configured logging tools: Many reviewers have complimented Istio's pre-configured logging tools, which include Prometheus, Jaeger, Kiali, and Grafana. Users have found these tools to be very helpful in collecting metadata and monitoring metrics for their microservices. The availability of pre-built solutions has also made the setup process easier for users.
Canary deployment process: A large number of reviewers have expressed appreciation for Istio's Canary Deployment process. This feature allows for zero downtime deployment while providing insight into network performance. Users love that this deployment process makes their infrastructure more reliable and helps avoid potential issues during updates or changes.
Difficult Setup: Some users have found Istio difficult to set up, especially if they were not familiar with the specific terminology used by the tool. The process can be tricky, especially on private GKE clusters with NAT gateway.
Steep Learning Curve: Several reviewers have stated that the learning curve for Istio is steep, which may make it challenging for some users to adopt. Istio's complexity of kube-proxy route forwarding function in each pod can increase response latency and consume more resources.
Lack of Documentation: Many users have experienced pain during migration due to a lack of documentation and examples to add-on to Istio. There is a need for more detailed information on how to use this tool effectively.
Based on user reviews, there are three common recommendations for Istio. First, it is important to conduct thorough research before getting started with Istio. Users emphasize the need to familiarize oneself with the platform and its capabilities to fully leverage its benefits. Second, reviewers praise Istio for providing user-friendly and well-documented resources. The availability of comprehensive documentation enhances the overall experience of using Istio, making it easier for users to understand and implement its features. Lastly, many users recommend using Istio specifically for deploying microservices in a Kubernetes environment. They find that Istio seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes and provides valuable functionalities such as traffic management and security, enhancing the overall performance and reliability of microservice architectures. Additionally, users advise against including access information within the microservices to maintain security. It is worth noting that Istio has been recommended multiple times by users, indicating their trust in its capabilities as a reliable service mesh solution.