Istio Service Mesh

Overview

An open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices.

• For in-depth information about how to use Istio, visit istio.io
• To ask questions and get assistance from our community, visit discuss.istio.io
• To learn how to participate in our overall community, visit our community page

In addition, here are some other documents you may wish to read:

• Istio Community - describes how to get involved and contribute to the Istio project
• Istio Developer's Guide - explains how to set up and use an Istio development environment
• Project Conventions - describes the conventions we use within the code base
• Creating Fast and Lean Code - performance-oriented advice and guidelines for the code base

You'll find many other useful documents on the Wiki.

Introduction

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes.

Istio is composed of these components:

• Envoy - Sidecar proxies per microservice to handle ingress/egress traffic between services in the cluster and from a service to external services. The proxies form a secure microservice mesh providing a rich set of functions like discovery, rich layer-7 routing, circuit breakers, policy enforcement and telemetry recording/reporting functions.

  Note: The service mesh is not an overlay network. It simplifies and enhances how microservices in an application talk to each other over the network provided by the underlying platform.

• Istiod - The Istio control plane. It provides service discovery, configuration and certificate management. It consists of the following sub-components:

  • Pilot - Responsible for configuring the proxies at runtime.

  • Citadel - Responsible for certificate issuance and rotation.

  • Galley - Responsible for validating, ingesting, aggregating, transforming and distributing configuration within Istio.

• Operator - The component provides user friendly options to operate the Istio service mesh.