Introduction to Istio

• Istio is a Service Mesh.
• A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture.
• It’s responsible for the reliable delivery of requests through the complex topology of services that comprise a modern, cloud-native application.
• In practice, the service mesh provides a variety of features including:

1. Traffic Management: Such as load balancing, rate limiting, and circuit breaking.
2. Service Discovery: Helps new services find and communicate with each other.
3. Security: Provides authentication, authorization, and encryption of communication between services.
4. Observability: Provides insights into behavior of application and its dependencies, including metrics, logging, and tracing capabilities.
5. Fault Injection and Testing: Helps developers to test the resilience of the service network.

• Istio installs a proxy in each of the pods running on the kubernetes clusters.
• Control Plane/Istio Daemon: An istio pod is installed in the istio-system namespace and used to collect the telemetry of all the network calls.
• Data Plane: The proxies in all the pods collectively are called data plane.