Istio

Istio is one of the famous service mesh implementations out there. It uses Envoy for proxy sidecars. Some of the features that Istio is providing includes,

• Service discovery

• Load balancing

• Failure recovery

• Rate limiting

• Audit trials

• Secure inner cluster communication

• Identity based authentication and authorization among containers

• Traffic management / cannary deployments / geo located routing

• Observability

Istio Architecture

Istio Architecture

Istio includes few components to get it's work done, which includes,

• Envoy proxies

• Citadel

• Pilot

• Mixer

Envoy proxies

Envoy proxies provides following functionalities

• Dynamic service discovery

• TLS termination

• Health checks

• Staged rollouts

• Fault injection

Citadel

Citadel provides following functionalities,

• User authentication and authorization

• Certificate management

• Traffic encryption

Pilot

Pilot provides following functionalities,

• Service discovery

• Intelligent routing

• Resiliency

Mixer

Mixer provides following functionalities,

• Access control

• Usage policies

• Telemetry data