From the latest CNCF annual survey, it is pretty clear that a lot of people are showing high interest in using a service mesh in their project and many are already using in them production. Nearly 69% are evaluating Istio and 64% are looking at Linkerd. Linkerd was the first service mesh in the market, but Istio made service meshes more popular. Both projects are cutting edge and very competitive, making it a tough choice to select one. In this blog post, we will learn more about Istio and Linkerd architecture, their moving parts, and compare their offerings to help you make an informed decision.
Introduction to Service Mesh
Over the past few years, microservices architecture has become a popular style of designing software applications. In this architecture, we breakdown the application into independently deployable services. The services are usually lightweight, polyglot in nature, and often managed by various functional teams. This architecture style works well until a certain point, when the number of these services becomes large and difficult to manage. Suddenly, they are not simple anymore. This leads to challenges in managing various aspects like security, network traffic control, and observability. A service mesh helps address these challenges.