Our first meetup: “Istio in Production: the benefits and challenges of Service Mesh!”

You’re probably using or trying to migrate to a microservices-oriented architecture, but not all are as easy as it seems. Along with the benefits of a distributed system that you already know, comes a series of problems that didn’t exist in a monolithic architecture. The concept of a Service Mesh promise to solve a good part of these new problems.

In this first meetup, we discuss how we are using Istio in production to solve these problems. We also explain how to use Prometheus to collect a series of metrics of network traffic and Grafana to display custom charts and configure alerts on it.

First presentation: “Istio: from zero to hero”

Istio is one of the most well known implementation of a Service Mesh. In this first presentation, Renato Stoco explores the main components of it and how they integrate with other systems, demonstrating how to deploy a Service Mesh from the ground up using Kubernetes, detailing how to setup a production-ready, fault tolerant cluster with high availability. He also pinpoint some problems that you’ll likely encounter along the way. In addition, he’ll quickly go through some nice tools like Jaeger and Kiali that you can use with Istio to improve tracing, monitoring and visibility of your Service Mesh.

Video:

Slides:
https://speakerdeck.com/stocco/apresentacao-meetup-istio

Check out more here:

Istio + envoy + grpc + metrics winning with service mesh in practice!

Renato Stocco explaining the first steps towards building a Service Mesh with Istio

Second presentation: “Extracting gold out of Service Mesh with Prometheus”

One of the key benefits of a Service Mesh is the possibility of generating clear visual representations of a highly distributed environment such as a microservice architecture. In this talk Victor Santos explores how we can use metrics generated by Istio to visualize what is happening, generating alerts when failures occur and even scale out the microservices based on certain Service Mesh behaviors. He shows how to collect these metrics generated by Istio using Prometheus and how to plot them in Grafana, creating custom charts and alert services.

Video:

Slides:
https://speakerdeck.com/vsantos/extraindo-o-ouro-do-service-mesh-getting-the-gold-from-service-mesh

Victor Santos on a live demo on Prometheus and Grafana

Thanks for all participants and organizers for this great meetup!

Like what you read? Join us in our next meetup:
https://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Microservices-and-Scale-at-Pismolabs/