What Is Istio? Overview, Working, Benefits, and Challenges

Istio is a 2017-launched service mesh solution for security, monitoring, and containerization. It is used to manage the microservice components of a cloud app by sitting as an overlay between the layers of a distributed application. This article explains what Istio is, how it works, and its key benefits and challenges. 

Istio is defined as a service mesh solution for security, monitoring, and containerization. It is used to manage the microservice components of a cloud app by sitting as an overlay between the layers of a distributed application. 

What Is Istio?

Istio cannot be understood without understanding the concept of service mesh. A service mesh is a layer of infrastructure that uses proxies to make calls between services faster, safer, and more reliable in a microservice architecture.

They are helpful for “greenfield” applications that run on Kubernetes or other container orchestrators. Service mesh technologies like Istio have emerged in the past few years, enabling well-managed, monitored, and safe microservices. They give developers valuable benefits in the three most important aspects — i.e., observability, traffic control, and security. It lets them control how different application components share data. In other words, Istio is a way to put the service mesh paradigm into action. 

What does Istio mean for Kubernetes users?

Istio is a Kubernetes-native mesh made by three companies working together — IBM, Google, and Lyft. It helps manage deployments, makes systems more resilient, and improves security. It uses open-source services such as Envoy, a high-performance proxy that handles all service traffic coming in and going out. It also uses Jaeger, which is a simple user interface that lets developers see and store distributed traces so they can use them for troubleshooting microservices.

Istio is an open-source service mesh that helps make abstraction layers on different Kubernetes-based microservices. Its powerful features make connecting, securing, and monitoring services more accessible and uniform. Users can achieve service-to-service authentication, load balancing, and monitoring with little or no changes to the service code. It also has a powerful control plane with essential features like dynamic service discovery, traffic split, rich metrics, fault injection, etc.

To understand Istio in the context of Kubernetes, you need to know what Kubernetes is. Kubernetes is an open-source platform that makes deploying and scaling containerized applications easier by removing many manual steps. It does this through more innovative automation and orchestration. Even though Istio works on any platform, developers prefer using Istio and Kubernetes together to make a containerized environment with microservices work well.

Istio for Kubernetes is built right into the app and keeps track of how the different parts of the app interact with each other. It also handles all inter-process service-to-service network communications in the cloud. 

It includes application programming interfaces (APIs) that let users integrate Istio with their existing logging platforms, telemetry, or policy systems.

No matter the environment (be it on-premise, private service, the cloud, Kubernetes containers, or virtual machines), Istio is compatible with various infrastructures. Istio for Kubernetes is a service networking layer that offers a transparent and language-independent approach to automate application network tasks. This is why it is helpful for use with Kubernetes.

As companies move faster to cloud computing environments, they are also updating their applications. One should ideally use microservices to build apps so they can be moved around in the cloud. Istio lets operation teams manage the new cloud-native apps in hybrid and multi-cloud environments that are getting more expansive daily.

Istio for Kubernetes manages traffic flows, enforces access policies, and collects telemetry data without changing the application code. It makes deployment easier by adding a transparent layer on top of already distributed applications.

With a service mesh like Istio, developers and operators can better handle the shift from monolithic apps to cloud-native apps, which are groups of small, independent, and loosely connected microservice apps. This makes deployments less complicated and takes some pressure off development and DevOps teams.

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Understanding the Working of Istio

You may break down the architecture of Istio into two distinct parts: the control plane and data plane. At its core, the data plane is an enhanced version of Envoy, an open-source edge and service proxy that facilitates decoupling network issues from the applications underneath it. It employs a series of network filters that users may plug in to handle connection requests. Additionally, Envoy is equipped with the capability of supporting an extra L7 layer filter for HTTP-based traffic. Let’s go into some more specifics about this component as well as the control plane:

1. The data plane

Support is added to the service in the data plane by putting a sidecar proxy in the environment. This sidecar proxy comes with a microservice and sends and receives requests between other proxies. When these proxies work together, they make a mesh network that stops microservices from talking to each other over the network.

Without this plane, services wouldn’t be able to talk to each other. Additionally, the network wouldn’t know what kind of traffic was being sent and couldn’t decide what to do with it based on where it came from and where it was going. Service mesh solutions like Istio lets you use a wide range of application-aware features based on how the system is set up. The built-in features of the Envoy proxies make it possible for Istio’s service mesh to work in many ways. These are:

• Traffic management: Envoy lets you control application traffic with rules for gRPC, HTTP, WebSocket, and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) routing within a single cluster and between clusters. This affects performance and lets developers develop a better deployment strategy. Using the Istio traffic management API, you can have fine-grained control over service mesh traffic. With these APIs, Istio can handle more kinds of traffic.

Virtual services and destination rules are the two most crucial API resources for controlling how traffic is sent. Virtual service tells the Istio service mesh how to route requests to a service. This is achieved using a set of routing rules evaluated in order. Then, another set of rules called the destination rules are used. The destination rules help keep traffic flowing to a pre-designated location.

• Network resiliency: Istio has built-in support for automated retries, fault injection, and circuit breaking right out of the box.

• Application security: The delivery of robust IDs to every service is the first step in ensuring security in Istio. The solution and its agents that operate alongside every Envoy proxy collaborate to automate the rotation of key and certificate pairs. Peer authentication and request authentication are both available as authentication methods for different use cases. 

In places where Istio provides mutual TLS as a full-stack solution, peer authentication is the method of choice for service-to-service authentication. Validation of JSON Web Tokens is also available via Istio, and it may be done using either a custom authentication provider or an OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider.

Envoy can implement access control, rate limitation, and the enforcement of security rules to the communication between underlying services.

• It provides transparent TLS encryption and authentication, strong identity, and robust policy, audit and authorization (AAA) tools to protect data and services.

Istio’s security-by-default model provides an in-depth defense to allow deploying security applications even across networks that are distrusted.

2. The control plane

The control plane will accept the configuration you want and its own perspective of the services. Further, it will dynamically program the proxy servers, updating them when the environment or rules are altered. It configures and manages proxies so that they can help route traffic. The key features of the control plane include:

• Secure cluster-based service-to-service communication with transport layer security encryption, authorization, and strong identity-based authentication. 
• The ability to control traffic behavior at a finer, granular level via the use of failovers, retries, elaborate routing rules, and fault injection.
• Automated load balancing for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), WebSocket, gRPC, and transmission control protocol traffic.
• Automated curation and compiling of all metrics, traces, and of traffic inside a cluster 
• Access restrictions, rate limitations, and quotas through a configuration API and pluggable policy layer.

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Architectural diagram of Istio

Istio’s architectural diagram shows the different parts that make up each plane, i.e., the control and data planes. It consists of services A and B, connected through proxies and data flowing along mesh traffic. 

Top 10 Benefits Of Istio 

Istio and Kubernetes are two components that, when combined, ensure that a containerized system based on microservices runs without a hitch. Istio is not reliant on any platform and may operate in many settings, including the cloud, on-premise systems, Kubernetes, or Mesos. Through Istio, DevOps engineers understand how monitored services interact. Its telemetry includes distributed traces, detailed metrics, and full access logs. All of these capabilities together provide many advantages:

1. A higher degree of observability

Istio Kubernetes offers granular observability and detailed insights into the distributed services that are being monitored. It assists in the process of obtaining specific information about activities taking place at the application level. It offers visibility and network management for classic and contemporary workloads, such as containers and virtual machines. It provides an opaque communication layer for use by apps independent of one another and executing inside the cluster.

2. An increased emphasis on safety

It does this by delivering what is known as mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS), which functions as a comprehensive solution for enforcing compliance and security policies, authenticating services, and encrypting traffic between services. This makes the interactions that take place within the communication network more secure. In addition, it emphasizes the application-level security of the system by using robust identity-based multi-factor authentication, authorization, and encryption.

3. Efficient management of the flow of traffic 

Istio contributes to effectively managing traffic behavior by providing extensive routing rules, failovers, retries, and fault injection. During post-production testing, the inclusion of Chaos Monkey via Istio enables site reliability engineers to insert delays and defects, which ultimately helps to make the system more resilient. The solution’s traffic management module contributes to decoupling traffic flow and infrastructure scalability.

4. Seamless traffic routing

Istio is responsible for enforcing network traffic management, which helps decide where service requests are sent as they come in. It manages the flow of traffic and API calling between dispersed services, which implies that it assists in intelligent routing. Requests are considered API calls when sent after configuring the API with the appropriate endpoints. Following the conclusion of the setup procedure, all data is delivered and processed, and finally, the response is dispatched.

5. Increased overall productivity of developers

To efficiently deploy an application, developers’ primary emphasis should be creating code. In addition, they are entrusted with the construction of libraries for managing service-to-service communication in many languages. The use of Istio may be of assistance in resolving these challenges. It allows programmers to concentrate only on the application’s logic while providing the capabilities necessary to enable microservices. This allows developers to focus more of their time, energy, and resources on the fundamental aspects of software development.

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6. Simplified service monitoring.

Istio offers service-level visibility that enables tracing and monitoring, facilitating issues resolution. Without access to granular-level data of an issue, it will be challenging to discover and fix bottlenecks. With a service mesh like Istio, you may quickly disconnect failing services to deactivate non-functional replicas and maintain the API responsiveness. 

7. Strong support for multi-cloud 

Istio Kubernetes is platform-independent. This implies that Istio-focused Kubernetes users may operate in container-based architecture and that various systems can be designed to run across multiple clouds. It is ideal for strengthening security between service-to-service connections, monitoring problems, and controlling traffic, regardless of whether the environment is a public cloud, data center, or hybrid cloud. 

8. Simplified load balancing and policy management

Istio Kubernetes employs automatic load balancing for all your traffic and sophisticated capabilities like client-based routing and blue-green and canary deployments. Istio also enforces policies with a configuration API and pluggable policy layer that supports access controls, rate limits, and quotas. Policies implemented are customized and integrated with access control lists, logging, and monitoring solutions.

9. Enhanced microservice and infrastructure functionality 

Istio enables the administration of microservices as they expand to various sizes. It also offers features for traffic control between all microservices. Istio isolates the proxy layer responsible for properly delivering requests between services. It improves infrastructure performance and dependability by capturing telemetry information from proxy containers and transmitting it to a monitoring dashboard. Istio is capable of tolerating ambiguous network outages and enables infrastructure self-healing. 

10. Improved infrastructure scalability  

Istio in Kubernetes may assist an organization with large-scale applications built on many microservices. As app traffic increases, the volume of requests between these services rises, necessitating advanced routing capabilities. This is essential to optimize the data flow and ensure the application’s continued high performance. Istio’s service mesh enables developers to add value to every new service they create rather than focusing on how services connect. 

For DevOps teams with a proven production CI/CD workflow, a service mesh is required for programmatically deploying applications and application infrastructure to handle source code and test automation tools such as Jenkins, Gits, Artifactory, and Selenium. It enables code-based management of networking and security settings. 

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Challenges of Istio 

Service mesh is an ambitious solution to resolve most, if not all, of the issues that arise from operating a microservice architecture. However, it cannot be immune to criticism and has its challenges. Istio can cause the following adverse outcomes::

• Added complexity: Adding proxies and other elements to an already complicated system raises the difficulty of development and administration. This increased complexity is due to an additional infrastructure layer.
• Shortage of expertise: Adding a service mesh to an orchestrator like Kubernetes necessitates the operations managers becoming specialists in both technologies. A lot of technological know-how and training are required by the operations managers. 
• Decreased speed: Service meshes like Istio Kubernetes are invasive and intricate technologies that can significantly reduce the speed of architecture. Utilizing a service mesh such as Istio has added a few obstacles. This results from the sidecar one must run through each time the application is called.
• Lack of documentation: Istio’s intrusiveness compels programmers, developers, and administrators to acclimate to a challenging platform and adhere to its regulations. The documentation is often outdated and not synchronized between projects that create the Istio ecosystem. There are very few papers describing how to carry out some operations. 
• Effort-intensive configurations: Istio may be configured easily with default settings in Kubernetes because many sources describe this. This may be enough for a development environment, but some higher-level environments like chaos engineering tests would require custom configuration. An experienced person must be in the project to hasten the configuration time. 
• Limited coverage: While Istio is excellent for providing resilience and security and managing deployments, it has certain limitations regarding service coverage. Istio’s diagnostics and performance telemetry are restricted within the interactions between the services it is designed to control. This implies that a comprehensive perspective of each service a transaction may interact with beyond the Kubernetes setting is required. 
• Risk of low visibility: To get distributed trace logs from Istio or even other service meshes, you must manually modify the code of every service within the interaction bandwidth. However, despite manual code modifications, you may not fully understand the inner workings of the service. A company might be unprotected in a field of Kubernetes nodes unless substantial resources and time is spent developing bespoke logging capabilities. 

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Takeaway

As cloud-native applications and microservices become the norm rather than the exception, using Istio (alongside Kubernetes) will become more prevalent. According to the CNCF Survey 2019, Istio is the no. 1 favorite service mesh, preferred by over 75% of developers. The use of service mesh technology increased to 36% in 2021, according to CNCF, signaling greater demand for Istio. Knowing its features, functionalities, benefits, and limitations can help maximize your microservice-based distributed app infrastructure. 

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