Hands-on with Envoy, Istio, and Kubernetes

Description

Container deployment platforms are a boring part of our infrastructure. The exciting parts, unfortunately, happen when services actually try communicating and working together to accomplish some business function. The service mesh approach has emerged to help make service communication boring. In particular, Istio—a project initially sponsored by Google, Lyft, and IBM—garnered attention in the open source community as a way of implementing the service mesh capabilities. These capabilities include pushing application-networking concerns down into the infrastructure—things like retries, load balancing, timeouts, deadlines, circuit breaking, mutual TLS, service discovery, distributed tracing, and others.

Projects like Istio are becoming more popular, and more people are putting them into production. Christian Posta offers a pragmatic, hands-on approach to understanding service mesh and the Istio architecture. Christian starts by introducing Envoy, Istio’s default service proxy, and explains how to configure it and use it to implement resilience functionality. Christian then walks you through deploying each component of the Istio control plane, covering all of the benefits it provides and how it works, from Istio Pilot as the main Envoy/sidecar proxy configuration component to Istio Ingress and Istio Gateway to the Istio Mixer. You’ll leave with a good understanding of how Istio works and the ability to debug it when things don’t go as planned.