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Service Mesh and Istio📜

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for making service-to-service communication safe, fast, and reliable, at times relying on a container orchestrator or integration with another service discovery system. Service meshes might deploy as a separate layer atop container orchestrators, but don’t require them, as control and data-plane components might be deployed independent of containerized infrastructure. Istio is able to do this using the envoy sidecar proxy which it auto injects into every application pod.

Benefits of Istio📜

  • Observability
    • Integrated Jaeger deployment for tracing.
    • Integrated Kiali deployment for service to service traffic visibility.
    • Integrated Prometheus deployment to scrape metrics.
  • Traffic control
    • Circuit breaking and retry logic.
    • Canary and Dark releases.
  • Security
    • More granular fine grained security applied on service to service interaction.
    • Mutual TLS can be applied at a cluster or namespace level.
    • Programming intelligence/security into applications without intrusive instrumentation using sidecar proxy.
    • Policy Standardization across the enterprise.

Additional resources📜

Please review the BigBang Architecture Document for more information about its role within BigBang.

The following links provide more insight into the architecture and operations of Istio: