Istio Ambient Explained

Istio Ambient Explained

by Lin Sun, Christian Posta
Released October 2022
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781098142681

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Service meshes such as Istio provide a lot of value to teams running microservices architectures or cloud workloads. But they do have their drawbacks. To help you implement their capabilities, most service meshes use a sidecar proxy, an architecture that comes with operational complexities and costly resource overhead.

In this report, authors Lin Sun and Christian Posta from Solo.io dive into Istio ambient mesh, a new sidecarless data plane mode designed for transparent application onboarding, simplified operation, and reduced infrastructure cost. Developers, architects, and platform owners will examine the challenges of existing sidecar architecture, explore the benefits of ambient mesh, and learn how to get started with Istio ambient service mesh.

With this report, you will:

  • Understand the challenges of sidecar architecture and why ambient was introduced
  • Dig into the main architectural components of Istio ambient, such as the secure transport layer and waypoint proxies, to learn how this service mesh works
  • Learn the benefit of adopting ambient mesh incrementally from the secure overlay layer to enable rich L7 functionalities such as resilience, observability, security, and policy enforcement, while understanding the adoption differences with sidecars
  • Learn how to get started with ambient and take the next steps

Product information

  • Title: Istio Ambient Explained
  • Author(s): Lin Sun, Christian Posta
  • Release date: October 2022
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781098142681