Istio: Up and Running

Istio is a service mesh announced in 2017 and supported by Google, IBM, and Lyft. It is open-source, incorporates Envoy Proxy, a component developed and battle hardened at Lyft, and is one of the fastest growing solutions for connecting, managing, and securing microservices.

Over time, microservices become opaque as they become larger. This makes troubleshooting and management increasingly difficult and complex. Service meshes, like Istio, introduce a way for operators and developers to easily manage their microservices. Among a multitude of use cases, Istio allows users to manage and control traffic and API calls between services, introduce resiliency and robustness when the network itself becomes unstable, provide observability of the dependencies between services, policy enforcement, mTLS and service identity, and more.

The hope is that readers will:

Gain a broad understanding of the service mesh Istio. It’s origins, current state, and future.

Be able to deploy, manage, and use Istio.

Be familiar with the components of Istio -- what they do, how to use them, common patterns and production scenarios.

Develop policies and manage them.

Secure their microservice.

A broad understanding of the Istio ecosystem.

How to engage with the community.

Early Release: Summer 2019
Publish: October 2019