Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Istio in Action! This book is intended for developers, architects, and operators of cloud-native applications and has something for everyone. Building and sustaining 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 between the applications. Istio is an open-source project that aims to help folks connect and manage their services and applications by solving for some difficult problems like network resilience, security, traffic management, observability and policy enforcement.

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.

In these first few chapters, you'll explore what forces might compel you to use technology like Istio, discover what this "service mesh" thing really is, and start to get hands on with Istio's capabilities. If you have any questions or comments, please post them in the book's forum or in the book's (source code repository). We'd especially like feedback on what areas could be made more clear, and what concepts might be missing.