Ever heard of the term “Microservices”? The term has gained tremendous popularity among new age developers, especially the ones working with containers. Well it actually is a form of software development scheme, designed specifically to comfort the independently deployable services, by breaking bigger and complex applications into smaller fragments which communicate over API. Managing and synchronizing all these information is quite complex in itself.
Google, IBM and Lyft have decided to help developers and DevOps professionals in protecting microservice-based applications. For this purpose, the trio is releasing a new platform, Istio, which is an open network, mostly for the container services, and which allows own to host your own deployable service. The network offers tools for load balancing, service-to-service authentication and monitoring, along with many other facilities.
All these functions could be performed without making any actual change to the existing application. It is so because Istio is based at the network level and utilizes proxy for intercepting all network communication between your microservices. For now, it is using the Envoy Proxy, which has been developed by Lyft, along with all its benefits.
Talking about the subject, the Isito team said;
As monolithic applications are decomposed into microservices, software teams have to worry about the challenges inherent in integrating services in distributed systems: they must account for service discovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, end-to-end monitoring, dynamic routing for feature experimentation, and perhaps most important of all, compliance and security. Inconsistent attempts at solving these challenges, cobbled together from libraries, scripts and Stack Overflow snippets leads to solutions that vary wildly across languages and runtimes, have poor observability characteristics and can often end up compromising security.
Istio will let its users authenticate any communication between all the applications using a TLS connection. With the help of Istio, developers may continue to monitor their service apart from load balancing, flow-control and providing security policies, which keep the work in progress despite faulty network connection.
Istio only supports Kubernetes container orchestration service for now, which is quite obvious citing the presence of Google, however, the plans are to incorporate other environments as well.
