In this chapter, we've looked at service meshes and Istio in particular. Istio is a complex project; it sits on top of Kubernetes and creates a type of shadow cluster with its proxies. Istio has outstanding features; it can shape traffic at a very fine-grained level, provide sophisticated authentication and authorization, enforce advanced policies, collect a lot of information, and help scale your cluster.
We covered the Istio architecture, its powerful capabilities, and explored how Delinkcious can benefit from these capabilities.
However, Istio is far from simple. It creates a plethora of custom resources, and it overlaps and extends existing Kubernetes resources in complex ways (VirtualService versus Service).
We also reviewed alternatives to Istio, including Linkerd 2.0, straight Envoy, AWS App Mesh, and Consul.
At this point, you should have a good understanding...
