Why should you care about a service mesh?

Istio provides a number of features that, without it, would require a developer to create them from scratch and edit their code. If a developer had to create many of the features provided by Istio, they would need to create the code in all of the languages that they are developing in. Need encryption between your services that are written in Java, Python, or Node? You would need to create the code three times – once for each programming language. The same would be true for traffic management, or any of the other features that are provided out of the box by Istio.

So, what can Istio provide you that should make you consider deploying it?

Workload observability

Have you ever tried keeping track of services and finding where the issue is when you have 20, 30, or more services running in your application?

Using the observability and tracing ability provided by Istio and add-on components, you can find and resolve issues...