Istio

As explained in Google Anthos in Action

Istio is an open-source service mesh that provides traffic management, security, and observability for distributed services.

Istio is an open platform for integrating microservices, managing traffic, enforcing policies, and aggregating telemetry. Its control plane abstracts the underlying cluster platform, such as Kubernetes. section 4.3

Istio centralizes several operational responsibilities:

• Balances HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic automatically. section 4.3
• Controls traffic with routing rules, retries, failover, and fault injection. section 4.3
• Applies access controls, rate limits, and quotas through a pluggable policy layer and configuration API. section 4.3
• Collects metrics, logs, and traces for traffic entering, leaving, and moving within a cluster. section 4.3
• Secures service-to-service communication with identity-based authentication and authorization. section 4.0 section 4.3

Istio addresses the operational complexity of distributed microservices by providing a dedicated communication-management control plane, observability, security, traffic control, and fault simulation. Anthos Service Mesh extends these capabilities as a Google-managed service for hybrid-cloud and multicloud management, with centralized visibility and Cloud Monitoring integration. section 4.0

Figure 1.1 Anthos components and functions

Use the architecture diagram to place Istio-based service management between Kubernetes infrastructure and enterprise policy and configuration automation. section 1.2

How Google Anthos in Action covers it

How deep it goes

Defines the control plane and major capabilities but stops short of component architecture or configuration procedures.

Examples

Uses routing rules, retries, failover, fault injection, telemetry, rate limits, quotas, and service-to-service authentication.

What it assumes

Assumes an underlying cluster-management platform such as Kubernetes and a distributed microservices architecture.

What you can do after

Evaluate Istio as a platform for traffic management, security, observability, and policy enforcement across service environments.

How it connects

Connects Kubernetes, microservices, service meshes, Anthos Service Mesh, Cloud Monitoring, and mutual TLS.

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Also explained in

• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Kubernetes in Action, Second EditionIstio is an open-source service mesh platform that provides traffic management, security, and observability for services.
• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Platform Engineering on KubernetesIstio is an open-source service mesh platform that manages and secures communication between services and provides traffic-routing and observability features.

Compare how 3 books explain Istio →

Related concepts

• service meshkind of · A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages communication and cross-cutting concerns such as traffic control, security, and observability between distributed services.
• traffic managementuses · Traffic management is the coordinated control, routing, distribution, or shaping of moving flows through a system.
• automatic sidecar injectionuses · Automatic sidecar injection is the admission-time addition of a proxy sidecar to newly created pods based on cluster configuration.
• Argo Rolloutsused by · Argo Rollouts is an open-source Kubernetes controller that manages progressive delivery strategies, including canary and blue-green deployments.
• gateway apiimplements · The Kubernetes Gateway API is a networking standard for defining gateways, listeners, and traffic routing between external clients and cluster services.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Google Anthos in Action. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.