Why developers like Istio

What is Istio?

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Istio is a tool in the Microservices Tools category of a tech stack.

Istio is an open source tool with 31.9K GitHub stars and 6.8K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Istio's open source repository on GitHub

Explore Istio's Story

Who uses Istio?

Companies

174 companies reportedly use Istio in their tech stacks, including medium.com, Ruangguru, and Groww.

medium.com

Ruangguru

Groww

Backbase

Avito

Bunch

Lime

Tech-Stack

QuintoAndar

Developers

576 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Istio.

tech-stack

dbones labs

My Stack

interest

Job Stack

My Stack

kehao95

My Stack

Istio Integrations

Docker, Kubernetes, Google Anthos, Ambassador, and Cilium are some of the popular tools that integrate with Istio. Here's a list of all 11 tools that integrate with Istio.

Docker

Kubernetes

Google Anthos

Ambassador

Cilium

SumoLogic

Apache SkyWalking

Flagger

Gloo Edge

Pros of Istio

Zero code for logging and monitoring

Service Mesh

Great flexibility

Powerful authorization mechanisms

Ingress controller

Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker

Full Security

Resiliency

Decisions about Istio

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Istio in their tech stack.

Anas MOKDAD

Software Architect · Aug 27, 2019 | 4 upvotes · 873.5K views

Shared insights

Kong

Istio

As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?

Developer MS

Jul 14, 2022 | 9 upvotes · 58.2K views

Shared insights

Istio

Dapr

At my company, we are trying to move away from a monolith into microservices led architecture. We are now stuck with a problem to establish a communication mechanism between microservices. Since, we are planning to use service meshes and something like Dapr/Istio, we are not sure on how to split services between the two. Service meshes offer Traffic Routing or Splitting whereas, Dapr can offer state management and service-service invocation. At the same time both of them provide mLTS, Metrics, Resiliency and tracing. How to choose who should offer what?

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Istio Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Istio?

linkerd

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Envoy

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Conduit

Conduit is a lightweight open source service mesh designed for performance, power, and ease of use when running applications on Kubernetes. Conduit is incredibly fast, lightweight, fundamentally secure, and easy to get started with.

Kong

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

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