Google, in a partnership with IBM and Lyft, recently announced a new open-source project called Istio. Istio’s purpose is to provide a uniform way to connect, secure, manage, and monitor microservices for application development.
Here’s more information about what Istio is and how you can use it to solve some of the common issues that go along with application development.
What is Istio?
Essentially, Istio provides a uniform layer of infrastructure between a service and the network that gives operators and developers the controls needed to run it. Istio runs with Kubernetes, on-premises or in any cloud. And you can use it to help solve some of the common challenges in application development.
Some of the abilities of Istio, when installed on any Kubernetes cluster, include automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, and TCP traffic, along with fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, traffic encryption, in-depth telemetry and reporting, among other abilities.
How can you use Istio?
Istio is currently being developed on GitHub. And community members are encouraged to help shape the program before the 1.0 release later this year. You can manually install and use Istio on Google Container Engine now. But in the future, Google hopes to provide a more automated and integrated experience so you won’t have to set everything up manually.
Google has also provided a sample application that you can use to learn more about and experiment with the abilities of Istio. The sample application is composed of four separate microservices that demonstrate the various features of Istio’s service mesh.
Google also has a form you can use if you’re interested in building an integration with Istio. And you can reach out to Google and others on GitHub if you have questions or issues while working with Istio.
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