Istio architecture

Now that we have installed Istio, enabled it for the BookInfo application, and also analyzed it’s operations, it is time to simplify what we have seen so far with a diagram. The following figure is a representation of Istio architecture.

Figure 2.12 – Istio architecture

The Istio Service Mesh comprises a data plane and a control plane. The example we followed in this chapter installs both of them on one node. In a production or non-production environment, the Istio control plane will be installed on its own separate set of nodes. The control plane comprises istiod components as well as a few other Kubernetes configs, which, altogether, are responsible for managing and providing service discovery to the data plane, propagation of configuration related to security and traffic management, as well as providing and managing identity and certificates to data plane components.

The data plane is another part of the Service Mesh...