The Istio service mesh

Istio addresses the challenges developers and operators face with a distributed or microservices architecture. Whether you're building from scratch or migrating existing applications to cloud native, Istio can help.

Service mesh

By adding a proxy "sidecar" along with every application deployed, Istio lets you program application-aware traffic management, incredible observability, and robust security capabilities into your network.

What is a Service Mesh?

Modern applications are typically architected as distributed collections of microservices, with each collection of microservices performing some discrete business function. A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that you can add to your applications. It allows you to transparently add capabilities like observability, traffic management, and security, without adding them to your own code. The term “service mesh” describes both the type of software you use to implement this pattern, and the security or network domain that is created when you use that software.

As the deployment of distributed services, such as in a Kubernetes-based system, grows in size and complexity, it can become harder to understand and manage. Its requirements can include discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring. A service mesh also often addresses more complex operational requirements, like A/B testing, canary deployments, rate limiting, access control, encryption, and end-to-end authentication.

Service-to-service communication is what makes a distributed application possible. Routing this communication, both within and across application clusters, becomes increasingly complex as the number of services grow. Istio helps reduce this complexity while easing the strain on development teams.

What is Istio?

Istio is an open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. Istio’s powerful features provide a uniform and more efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring – with few or no service code changes. Its powerful control plane brings vital features, including:

  • Secure service-to-service communication in a cluster with TLS encryption, strong identity-based authentication and authorization
  • Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic
  • Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection
  • A pluggable policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas
  • Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress

Istio is designed for extensibility and can handle a diverse range of deployment needs. Istio’s control plane runs on Kubernetes, and you can add applications deployed in that cluster to your mesh, extend the mesh to other clusters, or even connect VMs or other endpoints running outside of Kubernetes.

A large ecosystem of contributors, partners, integrations, and distributors extend and leverage Istio for a wide variety of scenarios. You can install Istio yourself, or a number of vendors have products that integrate Istio and manage it for you.

How it Works

Istio has two components: the data plane and the control plane.

The data plane is the communication between services. Without a service mesh, the network doesn’t understand the traffic being sent over, and can’t make any decisions based on what type of traffic it is, or who it is from or to.

Service mesh uses a proxy to intercept all your network traffic, allowing a broad set of application-aware features based on configuration you set.

An Envoy proxy is deployed along with each service that you start in your cluster, or runs alongside services running on VMs.

The control plane takes your desired configuration, and its view of the services, and dynamically programs the proxy servers, updating them as the rules or the environment changes.

Before utilizing Istio

Before utilizing Istio

After utilizing Istio

After utilizing Istio

Concepts

Traffic management

Routing traffic, both within a single cluster and across clusters, affects performance and enables better deployment strategy. Istio’s traffic routing rules let you easily control the flow of traffic and API calls between services. Istio simplifies configuration of service-level properties like circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, and makes it easy to set up important tasks like A/B testing, canary deployments, and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits.

Observability

As services grow in complexity, it becomes challenging to understand behavior and performance. Istio generates detailed telemetry for all communications within a service mesh. This telemetry provides observability of service behavior, empowering operators to troubleshoot, maintain, and optimize their applications. Even better, you get almost all of this instrumentation without requiring application changes. Through Istio, operators gain a thorough understanding of how monitored services are interacting.

Istio’s telemetry includes detailed metrics, distributed traces, and full access logs. With Istio, you get thorough and comprehensive service mesh observability.

Security capabilities

Microservices have particular security needs, including protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, flexible access controls, auditing tools, and mutual TLS. Istio includes a comprehensive security solution to give operators the ability to address all of these issues. It provides strong identity, powerful policy, transparent TLS encryption, and authentication, authorization and audit (AAA) tools to protect your services and data.

Istio’s security model is based on security-by-default, aiming to provide in-depth defense to allow you to deploy security-minded applications even across distrusted networks.

Solutions

Was this information useful?
Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

Thanks for your feedback!