Using Istio for developing locally

Using Istio’s powerful routing capabilities, you can allow engineers to develop a remote Kubernetes cluster by creating routing rules that are tied to specific engineers on your engineering team. Robert Ross explains how Namely enables engineers to write services locally and automatically test them out in a production environment without stepping on other engineers’ toes.

Namely’s engineering team relies on two lower-level environments before going to production. The company wanted to allow engineers to test their work against real services without having to run them locally, and Istio has let them do just that. By tying together the Kubernetes API, Istio, and telepresence, Namely engineers can create a sandbox that only they see in a real-life Kubernetes cluster, with full access to all gRPC and HTTP services that the company provides.