Istio solves some of the difficult challenges of service communication in cloud environments and provides a lot of capabilities to both developers and operators. We’ll cover these capabilities and how it all works in subsequent chapters; but to help you get a feel for some of the features of Istio, in this chapter we do a basic installation (more advanced installation options can be found in appendix A) and deploy a few services. The services and examples come from the book’s source code, which you can find at https://github.com/istioinaction/book-source-code. From there, we explore the components that make up Istio and what functionality we can provide to our example services. Finally, we look at how to do basic traffic routing, metrics collection, and resilience. Further chapters will dive deeper into the functionality.