Istio is an open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. Istio’s powerful features provide a uniform and more efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring – with few or no service code changes. Its powerful control plane brings vital features, including:
- Secure service-to-service communication in a cluster with TLS encryption, strong identity-based authentication and authorization
- Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic
- Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection
- A pluggable policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas *Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress
Istio is designed for extensibility and can handle a diverse range of deployment needs. Istio’s control plane runs on Kubernetes, and you can add applications deployed in that cluster to your mesh, extend the mesh to other clusters, or even connect VMs or other endpoints running outside of Kubernetes.