Introduction to Istio

Istio is a service mesh technology designed to streamline service connectivity, security, governance, and monitoring.

In the context of a microservices application, each microservice operates independently using containers, resulting in a complex web of interactions. This is where a service mesh comes into play, simplifying the discovery, management, and control of these interactions, often accomplished through a sidecar proxy. Allow me to break it down for you step by step.

Imagine a standard Kubernetes application comprising a frontend and a backend pod. Kubernetes offers built-in service discovery between pods using Kubernetes services and CoreDNS. Consequently, you can direct traffic using the service name from one pod to another. However, you won’t have significant control over these interactions and runtime traffic management.

Istio steps in by injecting a sidecar container into your pod, which acts as a proxy. Your containers communicate...