It has been in development for two years and has already been seen in the wild, but this week Version 1.0 of “Istio” was officially launched.
Istio is an open source microservices management tool, designed to handle load balancing, flow control, routing and the essential security needs of businesses that use microservices. It can handle service identity and security, policy enforcement and telemetry across apps running on multiple Kubernetes hosts.
It was welcomed as “ready for real production usage” by one leading HP software architect, Steven Ceuppens, of HP Fitstation and Google Cloud has already announced that it is offering a managed Istio service.
Microservices are applications that are constructed in a way that they are broken into smaller suites of services. This is done in such a way that it makes communication and protocols operate in a much lighter fashion. The Istio software rests on top of distributed applications, overseeing their interactions and facilitating secure communication between the microservices being used.
The Istio team wrote on their developer site that: “Istio has evolved significantly with the help of a thriving and growing community of contributors and users.”
See also: Microservices vs Monolith: Lessons from the Coalface
“We’ve now reached the point where many companies have successfully adopted Istio in production and have gotten real value from the insight and control it provides over their deployments.”
Features in the fully fledged version of Istio include multiple Kubernetes clusters that can be added to a single mesh and cross cluster communication. Istio also enables fine-grained control over networking APIs: “Explicitly modeling ingress and egress concerns using Gateways allows operators to control the network topology and meet access security requirements at the edge,” the Istio developer team said.
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One new feature of Istio is that it gives developers the option to test new updates on a selection of users as opposed to updating your entire client base only to realise that you have now broken systems for everyone and not just for a few of your users.
HP’s Ceuppens wrote: “We gained network visibility, metrics and tracing out of the box. This radically improved decision-making and response quality for our development and devops teams. The team got in-depth insight in the network communication across the entire platform, both for new as well as legacy applications.”
Red Hat Istio Support
Istio has received backing from large industry players, IBM has given support to the software with regards to its Kubernetes offering.
The developers point out that: “We’ve helped large enterprises and fast-moving startups like eBay, Auto Trader UK, Descartes Labs, HP FitStation, JUSPAY, Namely, PubNub and Trulia use Istio to connect, manage and secure their services from the ground up”
Google have also taken up the service on its Cloud Platform commenting in a blog post that: “Managed Istio surfaces all the services running in your cluster and manages network traffic between them.”
“Using application-level load balancing and sophisticated traffic routing for container and VM workloads, it also provides health checks, plus canary and blue/green deployments, enabling fault tolerant applications with circuit breaking and timeouts.”
