Service Mesh: Istio

What Problems a Service Mesh Solves

• Service authentication
• Service authorization
• mTLS
• Tracing
• Observability
• Protocol conversion

It moves microservice capability down a layer, offering microservices as infrastructure to the applications above.

History

• Open-sourced as 0.1 in 2017, and became a CNCF project the same year
• Released 1.0 in 2018, with support for Kubernetes and Envoy
• Returned to a monolith in 2020
• Added the shared proxy mode in 2022

How Istio Works

• Separation of control plane and data plane
• Sidecar injection
• xDS traffic forwarding