linkerd vs Istio Comparison | StackShare

Istio vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Istio: Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices, by Google, IBM, and Lyft. 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; linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices. 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.

Istio and linkerd can be categorized as "Microservices" tools.

Istio and linkerd are both open source tools. It seems that Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than linkerd with 5.01K GitHub stars and 501 GitHub forks.

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.

linkerd	Istio
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.	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.
Adaptive load-balancing;Fine-grained instrumentation;Abstractions over service discovery;Runtime traffic routing;Tech that's built for scale	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 37.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 8.1K
Stacks 130	Stacks 960
Followers 312	Followers 1.5K
Votes 7	Votes 54
Pros & Cons
Pros 3 CNCF Project 1 Light Weight 1 Service Mesh 1 Fast Integration 1 Pre-check permissions	Pros 14 Zero code for logging and monitoring 9 Service Mesh 8 Great flexibility 5 Powerful authorization mechanisms 5 Resiliency Cons 17 Performance
Integrations
No integrations available	Kubernetes Docker

Istio vs linkerd

Overview

Advice on linkerd, Istio

Detailed Comparison

What are some alternatives to linkerd, Istio?

Azure Service Fabric

Moleculer

Express Gateway

ArangoDB Foxx

Dapr

Zuul

Jersey

Ocelot

Micro

Claudia

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