DevOps
Advanced
What is Istio?
An open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices on Kubernetes.
Istio injects Envoy proxy sidecars alongside each microservice, forming a mesh that handles all network communication. This provides mutual TLS encryption, traffic routing, circuit breaking, retries, and detailed telemetry without code changes.
Key features include canary deployments (route percentage of traffic), fault injection (test resilience), rate limiting, and distributed tracing. Istio adds complexity but provides consistent networking policies across all services.