Author: Ravi Verma

Applications nowadays are distributed as microservices all over the cloud. Organizations use Kubernetes to manage these applications at scale, which has brought great flexibility and agility for development teams.

However, microservices and multicloud applications have given rise to new challenges. Now, it is harder to configure communication between distributed services and secure the data in transit. So it is inevitable for organizations to use service mesh, specifically Istio. In this article, we will briefly look at what Istio is and then see how to install Istio in Kubernetes in just 5 steps.

Today every application has microservices architecture where individual services are spread across public clouds and multiple Kubernetes clusters. Since all the communication of messages among services happens over the internet, it is very important to ensure the security of your data. You don’t want any malicious guy to read and record the data-in-transit (known as packet sniffing), or intervene in between the communication as someone you trust (IP spoofing), or perform a DoS attack such as bandwidth flooding or connection flooding, etc.

The idea is security should always be developed in a layered approach to build defense in depth. When software engineers are developing containerized applications they need to think about security at Code, Container, Cluster, and Cloud levels (read 4 C’s of container security).