What is Istio?

Istio is an open platform that provides a uniform way to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Istio supports managing traffic flows between microservices, enforcing access policies, and aggregating telemetry data, all without requiring changes to the microservice code. Istio gives you:

• Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic.

• Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection.

• A pluggable policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas.

• Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress.

• Secure service-to-service authentication with strong identity assertions between services in a cluster.

Istio can be deployed on Kubernetes, Nomad with Consul. We plan to add support for additional platforms such as Cloud Foundry, and Apache Mesos in the near future.