Utilizing Service Meshes
In the previous chapter, we looked at monitoring and observability. One of the obstacles to a comprehensive monitoring story is that it requires a lot of changes to the code that are orthogonal to the business logic.
In this chapter, we will learn how service meshes allow you to externalize many of those cross-cutting concerns from the application code. The service mesh is a true paradigm shift in the way you design, evolve, and operate distributed systems on Kubernetes. I like to think of it as aspect-oriented programming for cloud-native distributed systems. We will also take a deeper look into the Istio service mesh. The topics we will cover are:
- What is a service mesh?
- Choosing a service mesh
- Understanding Istio architecture
- Incorporating Istio into your Kubernetes cluster
- Working with Istio
Let’s jump right in.