Istio

Istio is an open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. Istio’s powerful features provide a uniform and more efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring – with few or no service code changes.

• For in-depth information about how to use Istio, visit istio.io
• To ask questions and get assistance from our community, visit GitHub Discussions
• To learn how to participate in our overall community, visit our community page

• Introduction
• Repositories
• Issue management

• Istio Community - describes how to get involved and contribute to the Istio project
• Istio Developer's Guide - explains how to set up and use an Istio development environment
• Project Conventions - describes the conventions we use within the code base
• Creating Fast and Lean Code - performance-oriented advice and guidelines for the code base

Introduction

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes.

Istio is composed of these components:

• Envoy - Sidecar proxies per microservice to handle ingress/egress traffic

> Note: The service mesh is not an overlay network. It > simplifies and enhances how microservices in an application talk to each > other over the network provided by the underlying platform.

• Ztunnel - A lightweight data plane proxy written in Rust,

• Istiod - The Istio control plane. It provides service discovery, configuration and certificate management.

Repositories

The Istio project is divided across a few GitHub repositories:

• istio/api. This repository defines

• istio/community. This repository contains

• istio/istio. This is the main code repository. It hosts Istio's

- istioctl. This directory contains code for the _istioctl_ command line utility.

- pilot. This directory contains platform-specific code to populate the abstract service model, dynamically reconfigure the proxies when the application topology changes, as well as translate routing rules into proxy specific configuration.

- security. This directory contains security related code.

• istio/proxy. The Istio proxy contains

• istio/ztunnel. The repository contains the Rust implementation of the ztunnel

• istio/client-go. This repository defines

[!NOTE]

Only the istio/api and istio/client-go repositories expose stable interfaces intended for direct usage as libraries.

Issue management

We use GitHub to track all of our bugs and feature requests. Each issue we track has a variety of metadata:

• Epic. An epic represents a feature area for Istio as a whole. Epics are fairly broad in scope and are basically product-level things.

• Milestone. Each issue is assigned a milestone. This is 0.1, 0.2, ..., or 'Nebulous Future'. The milestone indicates when we

• Priority. Each issue has a priority which is represented by the column in the Prioritization project. Priority can be one of

Istio is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.