Istio is the first service mesh implementation that works by injecting Envoy as a sidecar proxy alongside each microservice. The sidecar intercepts all of the service's traffic and handles it more intelligently than a simple L3/L4 network does. A mesh of sidecars constitutes the data plane in which each microservice has its own sidecar as a proxy. The control plane manages and coordinates the work of the sidecars through a set of central components. Overall, the service mesh is an abstract layer on top of applications to handle service-to-service communication.
In this chapter, we will understand the architecture of Istio from the perspective of the control plane to look at its features and functions. ...
