In collaboration with Google Cloud, Red Hat and the open community, IBM announced the release of Istio 1.0, the latest and most stable version Istio open source project that is positioning itself to become the de facto way to connect, manage and secure microservices.
Despite the agility and speed that cloud-native architectures bring to the table, one of the pitfalls is complexity. Apps, especially monotholic apps being broken into many microservices, can consist of hundreds, if not thousands, of moving parts. Managing all of these elements at once can be difficult and wreak havoc on security. By connecting and routing these pieces together, Istio gives control back to developers over how their app is operating and where data is routed in the cloud.
Members working on this challenge has now grown into a stable solution that simplifies microservices and enables developers to add, change and route requests within apps without having to update code or rebuild containers.This is why focus is given to Istio’s improvements on scaling the volume and complexity of microservices it can manage, while keeping developers in control of how the data flowing between services is managed and secured.Clients looking to modernize existing applications on the IBM Cloud can use Istio 1.0 to easily break them into agile, DevOps-ready cloud architectures without many of the security and control concerns that doing so may have brought in the past.
“Istio allows large enterprises to reliably deploy, secure and manage services across Kubernetes and VM environments, and we have received lots of great feedback from organizations who are using Istio in production,” said Dan Ciruli, Istio steering committee member and senior product manager, Google Cloud. “The Istio 1.0 launch is testament to innovation through collaboration across industry leaders, including Google Cloud and IBM.”
Istio 1.0 adds a strong layer of microservice management on top of Kubernetes and other environments. IBM supports Istio running on top of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services (IKS) and IBM Cloud Private platform. Support is provided for one single Helm chart across IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) and IBM Cloud Private(ICP).Customers can use the Helm chart to incrementally adopt Istio at their pace. Every IKS cluster has provided customers a unique certification and subdomain used for Kubernetes’ ingress into the cluster. With Istio, customers can easily reconfigure the same certificate and subdomain with the Istio Ingress Gateway for secure communication into the service mesh. With IKS,recently multizone support for Kubernetes have been launched, allowing customers to use Istio across multiple zones within fully managed Kubernetes service.
Nnumber of teams are there adopting Kubernetes to build their services. Now that Istio goes to production, they will be adopting Istio as well and using Istio to connect, secure, control and observe microservices.
Active contribution and leadership is provided within the Istio open source project, focused on key features such as networking improvements, incremental adoption, multiple environments, performance and scalability.
