2 First steps with Istio

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, we’re going to do a basic installation (more advanced installation can be found in Appendix XX) and deploy a few services. From there, we’ll explore the components that make up Istio and what functionality we can provide to our sample services. Lastly, we’ll look at how to do basic traffic routing, and metrics collection, and resilience. Further chapters will dive deeper into the functionality.

2.1  Deploying Istio on Kubernetes

2.1.1  Using Docker for Desktop for our samples

2.1.2  Getting the Istio distribution

2.1.3  Installing the Istio components into Kubernetes

2.2  Getting to know the Istio control plane

2.2.1  Istiod

2.2.2  Ingress and Egress gateway

2.3  Deploy your first application in the service mesh

2.4  Exploring the power of Istio with resilience, observability, and traffic control

2.4.1  Istio observability

2.4.2  Istio for resiliency

2.4.3  Istio for traffic routing

2.4.4  Clean up and prepare Istio for rest of the book

2.5  Summary