Scaling Istio to Multi-Cluster Deployments Across Kubernetes

Containers have changed not only how applications are developed but also how applications connect. Application networking, that is, networking between applications, is critical for production deployments and must be automated, elastically scalable, and secure. Real-world applications are deployed across on-premises, multiple clouds, Kubernetes clusters, and namespaces within clusters. Hence, there is a need to provide a Service Mesh across legacy and modern environments, providing seamless connectivity between applications.

In Chapter 3, we briefly discussed deployment models for Istio control planes. We discussed a single cluster with a local control plane, a primary and remote cluster with a single control plane, and a single cluster with an external control plane. A single-mesh/single-cluster deployment is the simplest but is also a non-practical deployment model because your production workload will include multiple...