Load balancing, traffic management, authentication and authorization, service discovery — these are just some of the interactions taking place between microservices. Collectively called a “service mesh,” these interconnections can become an operations headache when handling large‑scale, complex applications.
Istio seeks to reduce this complexity by providing engineers with an easy way to manage a service mesh. It does this by implementing a sidecar approach, running alongside each service (in Kubernetes, within each pod), and intercepting and managing network communication between the services. Istio can be used to more easily configure and manage load balancing, routing, security, and the other types of interactions making up the service mesh.