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Introduction to Istio
What is Istio?
It is just one example of what has become known as a service mesh. In other words, Istio is a service mesh :)
What is a service mesh?
A Service Mesh is a n extra layer of software you deploy alongside your cluster e.g Kubernetes or in short K8s.
Lets think about a standard micro service architecture that you are running on Kubernetes. As you know we are going to have a many Kubernetes pods and each pod typically (not necessarily) contains a container. As you know we can have multiple containers inside a pod.
Now these containers are all network together as we can use service discovery mechanism inside Kubernetes to make network calls from any container to any other container.
While Kubernetes is good at handling and managing the pods, For example if we do not need any pod, we can use kubectl command or any other mean to remove it from the cluster. However when we do so, we do not have visibility at all or the interconnections between pods.
This is where a service mesh can help.
In other words, we can think of in a way that network traffic that’s running through our cluster is going to be routed through this service mesh.
