layer5 VS istio

There’s no better way to test-drive Layer5 than by diving in and playing with it. The purpose of the blog is to create awareness about a service mesh like Layer5. To learn further it is recommended to go through the official documentations of Layer5.

From My PR being merged, working on UI, Upgrading Gatsby v2 to v3 for which I had to learn a bit about GraphQL, how Gatsby Plugins work (PR) to me shifting to CI/CD Issues, writing blogs, learning golang(for mesheryctl issues) to having the most amazing as well as exciting 1-1 call with Lee Calcote, Founder & CEO of Layer5 to discuss about my interests/aims and some future ideas/goals of the projects, the journey has been amazing and I hope it will be the same or much more exciting in the future 💯 Also, I have to thank Nikhil Ladha as well as other members of the community for constantly guiding and mentoring me 🍻

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.