Istio Reviews

When our developers are building the microservices, instead of imposing additional burdens or additional thinking on them, especially as part of network features such as traffic management, security, or observability, we deploy something from the infrastructure side, so developers need only focus on the business logic. 

We handle cases that include security, traceability, and traffic management. Features like traffic splitting, fault injection, and retry are possible with Istio.

Istio provides tremendous value, particularly in offering TLS and authentication over microservice-to-microservice communication. This improves security and traceability. It's significant for performance and operational consistency.

I primarily use Istio to communicate securely between different services. In Kubernetes, if I am not using Istio, applications would directly communicate with application pod containers. I wanted to ensure secure communication, so I deployed Istio as a sidecar container. When traffic arrives, it first goes to the sidecar container before reaching the application, ensuring security.

What I find particularly valuable about Istio is that it is free of cost. Compared to other technologies, Istio provides excellent documentation and support, allowing for easy troubleshooting. They also have a community tab. Additionally, the features that Istio provides, notably for free, are robust in terms of reliability and support.

I use Istio to manage traffic flow within my microservices architecture, particularly for the data and control plane components. It includes telemetry capabilities that I mentioned before. Istio provides important features like Service Discovery for service-to-service communication, which helps services interact. 

We can implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple service instances. Istio also offers traffic routing capabilities and circuit-breaking functionality. For security, it handles authentication using mutual TLS (mTLS) between services. It can authorize services using JWT tokens. Istio also allows defining policies for rate limiting to control traffic within services.

I use network collection to see error rates and resource utilization. Prometheus is a popular monitoring system I use for queries. I also use distributed tracing. For logging, I centralize and capture logs from all services.

I've used Splunk for log analysis and querying. With Splunk, I can create command-line queries to search and index large amounts of data in enterprise environments. This allows me to monitor user behavior, like detecting unusual data transfers (e.g., downloads or uploads over 20-25 MB) that could indicate potential security issues.

I can create automated queries to capture and analyze user activities across different locations and systems. This helps identify any concerning or "underground" behavior that could harm the company. The observability features let me automate the monitoring of the entire system and get insights into service and user activities.

Integration is generally possible with different systems, but understanding the specific components is needed. For example, integrating Splunk with AWS may require agents, plugins, or APIs. You have to research and understand these requirements.

I had a project using Okta for identity and access management with a SaaS application. We faced challenges connecting it to the browser using SAML protocol. We didn't initially realize we needed PKI. This shows how you need to understand all the "ingredients" or components required for integration.

I mostly work with Kubernetes in Google Cloud, and I use Istio to get better control over the network layer in my Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes manages the containers, making sure they stay up and running and doing what they're supposed to do, while Istio manages the communication between them.

Istio's service-to-service communication features are good. For example, if you're trying to set up a zero-trust environment where all your service-to-service interactions are authenticated and possibly encrypted, that's something that Istio can help with. It can also add a lot of extra telemetry information, so you can see what kind of latencies you're getting and ensure that communications are encrypted the way they're supposed to be. That's all stuff Istio can do.

I was previously an implementation engineer at Solo.io, which offers an enterprise version of Istio. Essentially, the product uses higher-level CRDs to manage the data plane and control plane of Istio. Solo also provides custom images of Istio, like FIPS-enabled versions. 

Most of the use cases I worked on at Solo involved multi-cluster environments with service mesh, which are traditionally difficult to configure. Solo's product made it easier to manage large multi-cluster environments. For some customers, we were dealing with up to a hundred thousand apps in the mesh, or even more.

A lot of the large-scale use cases included outlier detection and failover of backend services across clusters. Mutual TLS (mTLS) was also a very popular use case. Istio simplifies enabling mTLS connections for front-end to back-end services in a microservice environment. 

Typically, customers used the Istio Ingress Gateway as their primary API gateway. We also had many customers who wrote their own Envoy filters for the data plane, with a common use case being integrating a NextAuth gRPC service for redirects to their OIDC providers for front-end services. This was a very common implementation.

We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.

Istio has very few community forums. It would be good if the solution had more community forums.

Recently, we have faced an issue. We were using an old version of Istio. Our Kubernetes version in our cluster was about to upgrade, and it was incompatible with the old version of Istio. Our whole production system went down, and we faced a lot of service outages because of that. If you have an old version of Istio installed, it should be compatible with all the Kubernetes versions.

We had a Kubernetes cluster, and Istio managed all the security aspects we handled on the security layer. We were not writing that specific part in the code. The solution saved us time from writing complex code inside the code. Istio handled things like securing and the traffic management part.

The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application. Istio saves time in a more secure way. Since it saves time, we can focus on other areas while writing the code. The solution's security feature or mutual TLS authentication helps a lot in controlling the access policies.

Istio will make life easier if you are using Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for DevOps for infrastructure as a service. In terms of routing the request from different parts, Istio service mesh will make your life easy. There are a lot of internal technical discussions we can do regarding how it helps and what all those important things are.

Overall, it will make your life easier for DevOps people if they are using Kubernetes. If you are deploying it end-to-end with you taking ownership of deploying the ports and Kubernetes, Istio will make it easy for you.

Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting. It gives you a clear indication of how the data is flowing with the commands in the Istio service commands.