Getting Started With Istio

Understanding what a service mesh is and how it can be used effectively in a microservices architecture.

The last few years have brought about immense changes in the software architecture landscape. A major shift that we have all witnessed is the breakdown of large monolithic and coarse-grained applications into fine-grained deployment units called microservices, communicating predominantly by way of synchronous REST and gRPC interfaces, as well as asynchronous events and message passing. The benefits of this architecture are numerous, but the drawbacks are equally evident. Aspects of software development that used to be straightforward in the ‘old world’, such as debugging, profiling and performance management, are now an order of magnitude more complex. Also, a microservices architecture brings its own unique challenges. Services are more fluid and elastic, and tracking of their instances, their versions and dependencies is a Herculean challenge that balloons in complexity as the service landscape evolves. To top this off, services will fail in isolation, further exacerbated by unreliable networks. Given a large enough system, parts of it may be suffering a minor outage at any given point in time, potentially impacting a subset of users, quite often without the operator’s awareness. With so many ‘moving parts’, how does one…