istio VS k3s

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.

For self-hosting I've found https://k3s.io to be really good from the SUSE people. Works on basically any Linux distro and makes self-hosting k8s not miserable.

Yes it’s going to depend on which k8s distribution you’re using. We have work in-progress for k3s to natively support nix-snapshotter: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/pull/9319

For other distributions, nix-snapshotter works with official containerd releases so it’s just a matter of toml configuration and a systemd unit for nix-snapshotter.

We run Kubernetes outside of NixOS, but yes the NixOS modules provided by the nix-snapshotter certainly make it simple.

K3S: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that is designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on a virtual machine or cloud server.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Kubernetes - k3s distribution

I’ve created a local cluster with K3S and installing Windmill could not be simpler with just one chart to configure, which already has sane defaults to get started. For this demo we will also configure workers to passthrough environment variables to our scripts so that they have access to the Kubernetes API server for later.

You should be familiar with Kubernetes and have set up a Kubernetes cluster. I recommend k3s.

K3s' go.mod[0] is insane.

[0] https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/blob/master/go.mod