Conduit vs Istio

Overview

Istio

Stacks2.3K

Followers1.5K

Votes54

GitHub Stars37.6K

Forks8.1K

Conduit

Stacks8

Followers18

Votes0

Conduit vs Istio: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Conduit and Istio are both service mesh solutions that offer various features for managing and securing microservices architectures. However, there are key differences between the two that are important to understand when choosing between them.

Proxy Technology: Conduit uses a lightweight data plane proxy called Linkerd, which is designed for minimal resource consumption and fast performance. On the other hand, Istio uses Envoy, a highly extensible and powerful proxy that provides advanced routing and load balancing capabilities.
Control Plane Architecture: Conduit follows a simpler control plane architecture with most of the logic embedded directly in the proxy. In contrast, Istio has a more complex control plane setup with separate components such as Pilot, Mixer, and Citadel for policy enforcement, telemetry, and security.
Programming Language Support: Conduit is written in Rust and Go, making it suitable for environments with a preference for these languages. In comparison, Istio is primarily written in C++ and Go, which may require different skills for customization and contributions.
Community and Ecosystem: Istio has a larger and more active community, which results in a broader range of integrations, extensions, and support resources. Conduit, being a newer project, may have a smaller ecosystem and fewer third-party tools available for adoption.
Performance Overhead: Due to its lightweight proxy, Conduit is known for its minimal performance overhead compared to Istio, which, with its feature-rich proxy and control plane components, may introduce a higher resource utilization and latency.
Adoption and Maturity: Istio is a more mature project with a longer history of development and deployment in production environments, offering proven scalability and reliability. Conduit, as a newer project, may still be evolving in terms of features, stability, and adoption rates.

In Summary, Conduit and Istio differ in proxy technology, control plane architecture, programming language support, community size, performance overhead, and adoption maturity levels.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Istio, Conduit

Prateek

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

322k views322k

Comments

lyc218

Feb 21, 2020

Needs advice

Envoy proxy is widely adopted in many companies for service mesh proxy, but it utilizes BoringSSL by default. Red Hat OpenShift fork envoy branch with their own OpenSSL support, I wonder any other companies are also using envoy-openssl branch for compatibility? How about AWS App Mesh?

Any input would be much appreciated!

42.8k views42.8k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Istio	Conduit
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 37.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 8.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 2.3K	Stacks 8
Followers 1.5K	Followers 18
Votes 54	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 14 Zero code for logging and monitoring 9 Service Mesh 8 Great flexibility 5 Powerful authorization mechanisms 5 Ingress controller Cons 17 Performance	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Kubernetes Docker	Kubernetes

What are some alternatives to Istio, Conduit?

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.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

k3s

Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.

Related Comparisons

Conduit vs Istio: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Proxy Technology: Conduit uses a lightweight data plane proxy called Linkerd, which is designed for minimal resource consumption and fast performance. On the other hand, Istio uses Envoy, a highly extensible and powerful proxy that provides advanced routing and load balancing capabilities.
Control Plane Architecture: Conduit follows a simpler control plane architecture with most of the logic embedded directly in the proxy. In contrast, Istio has a more complex control plane setup with separate components such as Pilot, Mixer, and Citadel for policy enforcement, telemetry, and security.
Programming Language Support: Conduit is written in Rust and Go, making it suitable for environments with a preference for these languages. In comparison, Istio is primarily written in C++ and Go, which may require different skills for customization and contributions.
Community and Ecosystem: Istio has a larger and more active community, which results in a broader range of integrations, extensions, and support resources. Conduit, being a newer project, may have a smaller ecosystem and fewer third-party tools available for adoption.
Performance Overhead: Due to its lightweight proxy, Conduit is known for its minimal performance overhead compared to Istio, which, with its feature-rich proxy and control plane components, may introduce a higher resource utilization and latency.
Adoption and Maturity: Istio is a more mature project with a longer history of development and deployment in production environments, offering proven scalability and reliability. Conduit, as a newer project, may still be evolving in terms of features, stability, and adoption rates.

In Summary, Conduit and Istio differ in proxy technology, control plane architecture, programming language support, community size, performance overhead, and adoption maturity levels.

Conduit vs Istio

Overview