Ebook: Istio in Action

Solve difficult service-to-service communication challenges around security, observability, routing, and resilience with an Istio-based service mesh. Istio allows you to define these traffic policies as configuration and enforce them consistently without needing any service-code changes.

In Istio in Action you will learn:
• Why and when to use a service mesh
• Envoy’s role in Istio’s service mesh
• Allowing “North-South” traffic into a mesh
• Fine-grained traffic routing
• Make your services robust to network failures
• Gain observability over your system with telemetry “golden signals”
• How Istio makes your services secure by default
• Integrate cloud-native applications with legacy workloads such as in VMs


Reduce the operational complexity of your microservices with an Istio-powered service mesh! Istio in Action shows you how to implement this powerful new architecture and move your application-networking concerns to a dedicated infrastructure layer. Non-functional concerns stay separate from your application, so your code is easier to understand, maintain, and adapt regardless of programming language. In this practical guide, you’ll go hands-on with the full-featured Istio service mesh to manage microservices communication. Helpful diagrams, example configuration, and examples make it easy to understand how to control routing, secure container applications, and monitor network traffic.

About the technology
Offload complex microservice communication layer challenges to Istio! The industry-standard Istio service mesh radically simplifies security, routing, observability, and other service-to-service communication challenges. With Istio, you use a straightforward declarative configuration style to establish application-level network policies. By separating communication from business logic, your services are easier to write, maintain, and modify.

About the book
Istio in Action teaches you how to implement an Istio-based service mesh that can handle complex routing scenarios, traffic encryption, authorization, and other common network-related tasks. You’ll start by defining a basic service mesh and exploring the data plane with Istio’s service proxy, Envoy. Then, you’ll dive into core topics like traffic routing and visualization and service-to-service authentication, as you expand your service mesh to workloads on multiple clusters and legacy VMs.

What's inside
• Comprehensive coverage of Istio resources
• Practical examples to showcase service mesh capabilities
• Implementation of multi-cluster service meshes
• How to extend Istio with WebAssembly
• Traffic routing and observability
• VM integration into the mesh

About the reader
For developers, architects, and operations engineers.

About the author
Christian Posta is a well-known architect, speaker, and contributor. Rinor Maloku is an engineer at Solo.io working on application networking solutions.