Getting Started with Istio

In the previous chapter, we discussed monolithic architecture and its drawbacks. We discussed microservice architecture and how it provides modularity to large complex applications. Microservice architectures are scalable, easier to deploy, resilient, and fault-tolerant via isolation and modularization, leveraging cloud containers and Kubernetes. Containers are the default packaging format for cloud-native applications, and Kubernetes is the de facto platform for container life cycle management and deployment orchestration. The ability of microservices to be distributed, highly scalable, and work in parallel with other microservices amplifies the communication challenges between microservices, and also operational challenges such as visibility in the communication and execution of microservices.

Microservices need to have secure communication with each other to avoid exploitation and attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks. To solve such challenges in...