Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Istio in Action! This book is intended for developers, architects, and operators of cloud-native applications. Building and operating cloud-native applications is a tall order that ends up eliminating a lot of nice assumptions we had in the past and moving a lot of complexity to the network between the applications. Istio is an open-source project that aims to help folks connect and securetheir services and applications by solving for some difficult problems like network resilience, authentication/authorization, traffic control, observability and policy enforcement.Istio does this without requiring any language specific libraries or even code changes.

Because Istio brings so much to the table, it can be overwhelming at first. Having a firm understanding of what components make up Istio, their respective roles, and how Istio accomplishes what it sets out to do will help you feel more comfortable when adopting this technology. Additionally, Istio can (and should) be adopted incrementally, so understanding how it all works will help you decide which parts will give you the biggest value up front.