Istio Explained

Chapter 2. Introducing Istio

Now we turn our attention to our prime running example: the Istio service mesh. After reading this chapter, you should have a good understanding of Istio’s architecture, how it operates, and the key tenants of the project. Because we want to provide you with a hands-on cloud journey, we will walk you through getting Istio installed so you can use it for tasks in later chapters.

Why Do We Love Istio?

We choose to focus our attention on Istio because we are founding members of the project, and we have deep knowledge and experience with the project implementation. We have some familiarity with other service mesh implementations, but with Istio we have a greater depth of knowledge and working experience. Istio is a mature service mesh implementation that allows you to break down the complexity of distributed cloud native deployments by taking complex functionality out of the application code and moving it into the network. We find Istio to be the most feature rich, and it’s also built to serve the enterprise use cases most like those that we see in our day-to-day jobs.

Istio provides features that enable you to manage a network for deployed services with secure communication, monitoring, version-based load balancing, and much more. Istio works with modern cloud native applications because it requires little to no code changes with automatic sidecar proxy injection (shown in Figure 1-1) that intercepts all network traffic between services. Individually ...