http://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio
IBM, Google, and Lyft today announced that they’re giving the new, open Istio microservices mesh a ride — the kind of ride that gets you down the microservices highway in style and totally optimized.
Istio is a collaboration among the three companies to develop an open technology that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage, and monitor networks of microservices - regardless of platform, source or vendor. It supports managing traffic flows between microservices, enforcing access policies, and aggregating telemetry data, all without requiring changes to the microservice code.
Istio is a response to the changing landscape of application development using microservices, which is all about decomposing large applications into smaller, more manageable pieces. This works especially well in the development of large-scale, continuously available software in the cloud.
IBM's large enterprise clients are in the middle of this trend, and as microservices scale dynamically, issues like service discovery, load balancing, and failure recovery need to be solved uniformly. That's why the Istio collaboration is so important. IBM’s Amalgam8 project provided a traffic routing fabric with control plane. Google’s Service Control providedpolicy enforcement and telemetry. And Lyft developed the Envoy proxy to aid their microservices journey: from a monolithic app to a production system spanning 10,000+ VMs handling 100+ microservices.
Istio currently runs on Kubernetes platforms such as the IBM Bluemix Container Service. Design is not platform specific. IBM and Google are planning to build support for additional platforms such as CloudFoundry and VMs in the near future. Bottom line, Istio converts disparate microservices into an integrated service mesh by introducing programmable routing and a shared management layer.
To get started visit istio.io, and learn to set up a cluster with four distinct microservices. You can read more about Istio on our blog, developer.ibm.com/dwblog and subscribe to this YouTube channel to keep up with open technologies.
