IBM Cloud Managed Istio - An Awesome Tool
September 16, 2021

IBM Cloud Managed Istio - An Awesome Tool

Sachin Kumar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Managed Istio

We are into banking services. All our applications are microservices and we have multiple microservices for example Azure app services, Databricks, Azure SQL managed services, etc., [all of] which communicate with each other for a response. Managing the network services communication for each service is a complex process in Azure Kubernetes Services. So we integrated IBM Cloud Managed Istio with AKS cluster. Now with this new integration, it helps us to manage the routing of services, [where] we can very easily define traffic rules (i.e. ingress and egress networks). It helps to debug application connectivity issues with different types of graphs, i.e. useful in debugging.
Yes, it is used across the whole organization.
  • Managing the cluster, i.e. pods connectivity
  • Managing the ingress/egress network configuration for routing of service flow
  • Nice dashboard for monitoring the health of application
  • Trigger alerts to pager duty if something goes wrong to appropriate team
  • Pods (container) security, i.e. it will only run with specific users also got resolved
  • Complex to understand. IBM needs to provide more example documentations.
  • Updating the [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] to latest version can sometimes break the application.
  • Implementation of integration of [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] with other tools like Grafana, Sumologic for monitoring is very complex; it can be improved.
  • 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.
1) One-stop solution for all the complex network connectivity managed by [IBM Cloud Managed Istio].
2) Nice dashboard to understand the flow.
3) Easy to troubleshoot the service if any one of the APIs is not responding.
4) We can integrate it with Azure Kubernetes service and other cloud provider Kubernetes services.
5) Monitoring the health of the pods can be easily configured and alerts can be triggered very accurately with this tool.

Do you think IBM Cloud Managed Istio delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Cloud Managed Istio's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Cloud Managed Istio live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Cloud Managed Istio go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Cloud Managed Istio again?

Yes

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Azure Container Instances, Kubernetes, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server), GitLab
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.

IBM Cloud Managed Istio Feature Ratings

Ease of building user interfaces
7
Scalability
8
Platform management overhead
8
Workflow engine capability
8
Platform access control
8
Services-enabled integration
8
Development environment creation
7
Development environment replication
8
Issue monitoring and notification
9
Issue recovery
9
Upgrades and platform fixes
7