Preface

Istio is one of the most widely adopted Service Mesh technologies. It is used to manage application networking to provide security and operational efficiency to microservices. This book explores Istio layer by layer to explain how it is used to manage application networking, resiliency, observability, and security. Using various hands-on examples, you’ll learn about Istio Service Mesh installation, its architecture, and its various components. You will perform a multi-cluster installation of Istio along with integrating legacy workloads deployed on virtual machines. You’ll learn how to extend the Istio data plane using WebAssembly (WASM), as well as covering Envoy and why it is used as the data plane for Istio. You’ll see how OPA Gatekeeper can be used to automate best practices for Istio. You’ll learn how to observe and operate Istio using Kiali, Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger. You’ll also explore other Service Mesh technologies such as Linkerd, Consul, Kuma, and Gloo Mesh. The easy-to-follow hands-on examples built using lightweight applications throughout the book will help you to focus on implementing and deploying Istio to cloud and production environments instead of having to deal with complex demo applications.

After reading this book, you’ll be able to perform reliable and zero-trust communication between applications, solve application networking challenges, and build resilience in distributed applications using Istio.