Istio vs NGINX

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Istio vs nginx: What are the differences?

Istio and NGINX are both popular tools used in the field of networking and microservices. Istio simplifies microservices deployment and operation, while NGINX is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy commonly used as an API gateway or load balancer in microservices architectures. Let's explore the key differences between them:

  1. Architecture: Istio is a service mesh platform that works at the network layer to manage and control the communication between microservices. It integrates with the underlying infrastructure and deploys a sidecar proxy alongside each microservice to handle traffic routing, load balancing, and security features. NGINX, on the other hand, is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy server that operates at the application layer. It uses a single server instance to handle incoming requests and can be configured as a reverse proxy for load balancing and proxying traffic to backend services.

  2. Functionality: Istio provides advanced capabilities for traffic management, observability, and security in microservices architectures. It offers features like intelligent routing, circuit breaking, request tracing, and mutual TLS authentication. Istio also supports service discovery and can dynamically adjust traffic flow based on various conditions. NGINX, on the other hand, excels in high-performance web serving and acts as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and caching server. It is known for its efficient handling of static and dynamic content, SSL termination, and HTTP acceleration.

  3. Use Cases: Istio is ideal for complex microservices architectures, enabling management of service-to-service communication, observability, and security. It addresses challenges like traffic routing, fault tolerance, and policy enforcement in cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes. NGINX, on the other hand, excels as a web server and reverse proxy for traditional web applications, offering high traffic handling, performance improvement, caching, and SSL termination capabilities.

  4. Integration and Ecosystem: Istio seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes and leverages its additional features. It also integrates with other service mesh tools like Prometheus for monitoring and Grafana for visualization. NGINX, as a versatile web server, integrates well with various technology stacks and supports different application frameworks and server-side languages. Its rich ecosystem of modules and extensions further enhances its functionality.

In summary, Istio is a service mesh that provides traffic management, load balancing, and observability features to simplify the deployment and operation of microservices. NGINX, on the other hand, is a high-performance web server and reverse proxy server that excels at handling HTTP requests and serving static content, often used as an API gateway or load balancer in microservices environments.

Advice on Istio and NGINX

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!

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Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 622.3K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.

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Needs advice
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
and
NGINXNGINX

From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

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Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 591.8K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about Istio and NGINX
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 286.2K views

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.

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Pros of Istio
Pros of NGINX
  • 14
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 9
    Service Mesh
  • 8
    Great flexibility
  • 5
    Resiliency
  • 5
    Powerful authorization mechanisms
  • 5
    Ingress controller
  • 4
    Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker
  • 4
    Full Security
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 893
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 288
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 225
    Web server
  • 175
    Simplicity
  • 136
    Easy setup
  • 30
    Content caching
  • 21
    Web Accelerator
  • 15
    Capability
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    High-latency
  • 12
    Predictability
  • 8
    Reverse Proxy
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 7
    Supports http/2
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 5
    Lots of Modules
  • 5
    Enterprise version
  • 4
    High perfomance proxy server
  • 3
    Reversy Proxy
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Blash
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Fast and easy to set up
  • 2
    Slim
  • 2
    saltstack
  • 1
    Virtual hosting
  • 1
    Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
  • 1
    Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
  • 1
    Ingress controller

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Cons of Istio
Cons of NGINX
  • 16
    Performance
  • 10
    Advanced features require subscription

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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.

What is NGINX?

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

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What companies use Istio?
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Blog Posts

What are some alternatives to Istio and NGINX?
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.
See all alternatives