Istio is a service mesh that enables teams to manage traffic in distributed workloads without modifying the workloads themselves, making it easier to implement load balancing, canarying, circuit breakers, and other design choices. Versions of Istio prior to 1.5 adopted a microservices architecture and deployed each Istio component as an independently scalable Kubernetes pod. Version 1.5 signalled a change in course, moving all of its components into a single binary, istiod.

In this article, we are going to deploy and monitor Istio over a Kubernetes cluster. Istio is a service mesh platform that offers advanced routing, balancing, security, and high availability features, plus Prometheus-style metrics for your services out-of-the-box.

As a network of microservices changes and grows, the interactions between them can be difficult to manage and understand. That’s why it’s handy to have a service mesh as a separate infrastructure layer. A service mesh is an approach to solving microservices at scale. It handles routing and terminating traffic, monitoring and tracing, service delivery and routing, load balancing, circuit breaking and mutual authentication.

Rapid software release is the new norm – and that has pushed many companies to ditch their monolithic software development approach in favor of SOA. More companies are embracing microservices – an SOA-style approach for developing and deploying business logic as small, independently deployed services – for a number of reasons: it reduces risk, is faster to deploy and it easily scales.