Deploying Istio Service Mesh for Non-Kubernetes Workloads

Istio and Kubernetes are technologies that complement each other. Kubernetes solves the problem of managing distributed applications packaged as containers isolated from each other and deployed in a consistent environment with dedicated resources. Although Kubernetes solves container deployment, scheduling, and management, it doesn’t solve traffic management between containers. Istio complements Kubernetes by providing traffic management capabilities, adding observability, and enforcing a zero-trust security model.

Istio is like a sidecar to Kubernetes; having said that, Kubernetes is a fairly new technology that got mainstream adoption approximately around 2017. From 2017 onward, most enterprises have used Kubernetes when building microservices and other cloud-native applications, but there are still many applications that are not built on Kubernetes and/or not migrated to Kubernetes; such applications are traditionally...