Setting up a Service Mesh for hybrid architecture

In this section, we will set up the Service Mesh. But first, let’s look at the steps at a high level in the Overview of the setup section and then perform implementation in the Setting up a demo app on a virtual machine section.

Overview of the setup

Envoy is a great networking software and an excellent reverse proxy; it is also widely adopted as a standalone reverse proxy. Solo.io and a few others have built API gateway solutions using Envoy, and Kong Inc. has both Kong Mesh and Kuma Service Mesh technologies, which make use of Envoy as sidecars for the data plane.

Envoy, when deployed as a sidecar, has no idea about being a sidecar; it communicates to istiod via the xDS protocols. Istio init bootstraps Envoy with the right configuration and details about istiod, and sidecar injection mounts the right certificates, which are then used by Envoy to authenticate itself with istiod; once bootstrapped, it keeps fetching...