Overview
Istio is a powerful service mesh that layers onto existing distributed applications. It provides a wealth of features including load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring, with few or no code changes in service code.
Key Features
- Traffic Management: Fine-grained control over traffic behavior with rich routing rules (e.g., A/B testing, canary rollouts).
- Security: Provides strong identity-based authentication, authorization, and encryption (mTLS) between services.
- Observability: Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within the mesh.
Architecture
Istio uses a Control Plane (Istiod) to manage and configure the mesh, and a Data Plane composed of Envoy proxies deployed as sidecars alongside every service.