Istio is a powerful collection of service mesh tools. It allows you to connect microservices through the deployment of Envoy proxies as sidecar containers. Because Envoy is programmable, the Istio control plane's configuration changes are communicated to all the proxies, which then reconfigure themselves accordingly.
The Envoy proxies are, among other things, responsible for handing encryption and authentication. With Istio, enabling mutual TLS between your services requires a single switch in the configuration for the majority of the time. If you don't want mTLS between all your services, you may also select those that demand this additional protection while allowing unencrypted traffic between everything else.
Istio also helps with observability. First of all, the Envoy proxies export proxy-level metrics compatible with Prometheus. There are also service-level metrics and control plane metrics exported by Istio. Next, there are distributed traces that describe the traffic...
