Introduction
Istio
Istio is a completely open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. It’s also a platform, including APIs, that let it integrate into any logging platform, or telemetry or policy system.
Let’s review in more detail what each of the components that make up this service mesh are.
Envoy
- Processes the inbound/outbound traffic from inter-service and service-to-external-service transparently.
Pilot
- Pilot provides service discovery for the Envoy sidecars, traffic management capabilities for intelligent routing (e.g., A/B tests, canary deployments, etc.), and resiliency (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, etc.)
Mixer
- Mixer enforces access control and usage policies across the service mesh, and collects telemetry data from the Envoy proxy and other services.
Citadel
- Citadel provides strong service-to-service and end-user authentication with built-in identity and credential management.