Incorporating Istio into your Kubernetes cluster
In this section, we will get to know Istio a little better, install it into a fresh cluster, and explore all the service goodness it provides.
Understanding the Istio architecture
First, let's meet the main components of Istio and understand what they do and how they relate to each other.
Istio is a large framework that provides a lot of capabilities, and it has multiple parts that interact with each other and with Kubernetes components (mostly indirectly and unobtrusively). It is divided into a control plane and a data plane. The data plane is a set of proxies (one per pod). Their control plane is a set of components that are responsible for configuring the proxies and collecting telemetry data.
The following diagram illustrates the different parts of Istio, how they are related to each other, and what information is exchanged between them:
Figure 14.5: Istio architecture
Let's go a little deeper...