Great documentation and some really great tools included. I was able to get the platform running in minikube really quickly. Interested to compare this to linkerd.
Linkerd is great technology but it is restricted to traffic management only. Istio provides a complete mesh that incorporates authentication and policy enforcement, in addition to traffic management and telemetry.
The Istio Auth subsystem provides certificate management and we are working on extending it to support authorization primitives as well.
The telemetry model is also different. Rather than having direct integrations with different metrics backends, we normalize metrics and pipe them through a single engine that can then re-route to any metrics backends (or multiple).
In contrast to Envoy, linkerd provides a minimalist configuration language, and explicitly does not support hot reloads, relying instead on dynamic provisioning and service abstractions.
The overlap with Linkerd is around routing, resilience, metrics/tracing, and the deployment model (at high level).
Our deployment model is a bit more transparent. Traffic gets transparently routed via Envoy, without using HTTP_PROXY or direct addressing of sidecars. This implies zero change to application code.
Secondly, Istio brings two more things to the table: policy enforcement (rate limits, ACLs, etc.), and authentication/authorization. Istio enables mutual TLS auth between services with automatic certificate management. The policy plane is extensible, where you can plug in adapters or specific policy implementations.
The initial release for Istio is targeted at kubernetes. However, Istio is designed to be easy to adapt to other environments. With community help, we anticipate extending it to enable services across cloud foundry, VM, and hybrid clouds. We hope to have major new releases every 3 months, including adding new environments.
Thanks, This is interesting. Currently where I work, we have not started using containers/schedulers etc. We simply use VMs for services. For now I simply want to experiment with these new technologies.
Not sure it's right to compare linkerd with istio. Likely you should compare envoy (which istio is built around) with linkerd. Envoy can be deployed without kubernetes.
