istio VS ingress-nginx

Istio is a popular open-source service mesh framework that provides a comprehensive solution for managing, securing, and observing microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes.

Leverage a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd to manage communication between microservices within the Kubernetes cluster. These service meshes can be configured to intercept JMX traffic and enforce access control policies. Benefits:

Open Source and Cloud Computing: A Match Made in Heaven The cloud is accelerating OSS adoption. Cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes [https://kubernetes.io/] and Istio [https://istio.io/], both open-source projects, are revolutionizing how applications are built and deployed across cloud platforms.

Consider the case of Bookinfo, a sample application provided by Istio, rewritten using CloudWeGo's Kitex for superior performance and extensibility.

It is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication, providing features like load balancing, encryption, authentication, and monitoring. Istio deploys sidecar proxies alongside each microservice instance. These proxies handle communication, providing features like load balancing, service discovery, encryption, monitoring and authentication.

5Y old post that sounds like they've done similar here: Caddy Issue Istio Issue but doesn't cover much of the implementation

In a production environment there will be a load balancer setup with an Ingress Controller, Service Mesh or some type of Custom Router. This allows all traffic to be sent to the single load balancer IP address and then route the traffic to a service based on the Domain name or subpath. We are using a NGINX ingress controller but service meshes like Istio have been becoming the most popular solution to use as they offer more segmentation, security and granular control.

Flagger is a progressive delivery tool that enables a Kubernetes operator to automate the promotion or rollback of deployments based on metrics analysis. It supports a variety of metrics including Prometheus, Datadog, and New Relic to name a few. It also works well with Istio service mesh, and can implement progressive traffic splitting between primary and canary releases.

End-to-end data encryption with a service mesh: Using an end-to-end data encryption mechanism with a service mesh like Istio, TLS can secure communication between different microservices within a Kubernetes cluster. This is a popular approach for modern, distributed microservice architectures.

# Add NGINX ingress using Helm eks.HelmChart( self, "NginxIngress", cluster=cluster, chart="ingress-nginx", repository="https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx", namespace="ingress-nginx", values=helm_values )

ingress-nginx

The second one is a combination of tools: External DNS, cert-manager, and NGINX ingress. Using these as a stack, you can quickly deploy an application, making it available through a DNS with a TLS without much effort via simple annotations. When I first discovered External DNS, I was amazed at its quality.

resource "helm_release" "icrelease" { name = "nginx-ingress" repository = "https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx" chart = "ingress-nginx" version = "4.9.1" namespace = kubernetes_namespace.icnamespace.metadata[0].name set { name = "controller.ingressClassResource.default" value = "true" } }

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx helm repo update helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace -f custom/ghost/nginx.yaml

For example, if you chose Nginx Ingress, you will use some of its dozens of annotations that are not portable if you decide to switch to another Ingress implementation like Apache APISIX.

The controller is installed with helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx --repo https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace

helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx helm repo add rancher-latest https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/latest helm repo update helm repo list

Everything in the YAML snippets below — except for ingress configuration — relates to configuring the NGINX ingress controller. This includes customizing the default configuration.