Istio Service Mesh

Overview

Istio is an open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices architectures. It uses a sidecar proxy pattern with Envoy proxies to intercept and control all network communication between services.

Core Capabilities

Traffic Management: Load balancing, traffic splitting, canary deployments, blue-green deployments, A/B testing, retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, fault injection.

Security: mTLS encryption, certificate management, authentication, authorization policies, RBAC, JWT validation, service-to-service security.

Observability: Distributed tracing, metrics collection, access logging, service topology visualization, golden signals monitoring.

Quick Reference: Common Tasks