Networking layers have traditionally been a burden on engineering organizations to get networking right. Networking layers such as meshes look as clusters as a whole and attempt to add networking controls. An efficient mesh is one that can be declared with infrastructure as code ( IaC ).

Istio is a specific networking mesh you can add to your cloud native cluster. It’s tuned for ease of use with Kubernetes, and can be used for meshing other services outside of Kubernetes. Use Istio for declarative control over these networking architecture x-ilities:

• Connectability
• Securability
• Controllability
• Observability

Istio (in the Greek alphabet, ιστίο) is Greek for the noun “sail,” and is pronounced “iss-teeh-oh." .

At a high level, Istio helps reduce the complexity of these deployments, and eases the strain on your development teams. It is a completely open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. It is also a platform, including APIs that let it integrate into any logging platform, or telemetry or policy system. Istio’s diverse feature set lets you successfully, and efficiently, run a distributed microservice architecture, and provides a uniform way to secure, connect, and monitor microservices.

This lab has been adapted from Istio’s Getting Started guide .

In this lab, you will learn how to:

    ☐ Install Istio on Kubernetes following its recommended best practices
    ☐ Install Istio’s Bookinfo as a Hello World for Istio
    ☐ Start manipulating Istio declarations to control your network close to the application plane