Author: Zen and the Art of Computer Programming
1 Introduction
Istio is an open source service mesh (Service Mesh) management framework jointly launched by Google, IBM, Lyft and Tetrate. It can provide traffic management, load balancing, circuit breakers, policy execution and monitoring between microservices. Compared with other service mesh solutions (such as Linkerd or Envoy Proxy), Istio provides more advanced functions, such as flow control, authentication, security, telemetry, observability, etc.
This article will let readers truly feel its powerful functions and capabilities through the detailed process of installing Istio and the command line operation guide.
2.Basic concepts
2.1 Service Mesh
Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer used to connect, protect and control communication between services. It is usually a lightweight network proxy that runs in each service cluster and handles all traffic entering and leaving the cluster. You can think of it as a dedicated sidecar to ensure safe, transparent and reliable communication between applications. It can also provide comprehensive capabilities such as policy enforcement, traffic monitoring, and access control within the cluster. Currently, the most popular service mesh products are Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect and App Mesh.
One of the biggest advantages of service mesh is that it provides secure and powerful traffic control functions. Traffic control can help you control the traffic between applications more precisely, thereby optimizing application performance, reducing traffic costs, and improving user experience. Moreover, Istio provides a unified traffic management mechanism, making the service mesh easy to use and transparent to the business.
2.2 Kubernetes
Kubernetes is currently the most popular container orchestration platform that can be used to deploy, scale and manage containerized applications. It provides a simple set of models for declaring and managing containerized workloads and supports multiple programming languages and frameworks.