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API Gateway vs. Istio Service Mesh

Architects, DevOps, and cloud engineers are gradually trying to understand which is better to continue the journey with: the API gateway, or adopt an entirely new service mesh technology? In this article, we will try to understand the difference between the two capabilities and lay out some reasons for the software team to consider or not consider a service mesh such as Istio (because it is the most widely used service mesh). 

Please note we are heavily driven by the concept of MASA architecture that guarantees infrastructure agility, flexibility, and innovation for software development and delivery teams. (MASA — a mesh architecture of apps, APIs, and services — provides technical application professionals delivering applications with the optimal architecture to meet those needs.)

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Canary and Dark Release Using an Istio Service Mesh on Kubernetes

Istio Service Mesh on Kubernetes (k8s) cluster brings in quite a few architectural patterns off the shelf. In this article , I want to show you how we can quickly implement Canary Releases and Dark Releases using Istio service mesh

As a developer, it is imperative that you are able to install a k8s cluster and try out. With the latest release of Kops, it is pretty straightforward to fire up a new K8s cluster on AWS. I have created a series of steps and commands in my repo here - Kubernetes-AWS-Istio, which you can follow to create it on AWS. I have also kept istio installation file that you can apply using kubectl to start Istio pods on cluster. You do not need to install Istioctl to install Istio if you use the file provided by me. The Istio installation file on my repo is a standard K8s YAML.

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Service Mesh and Cloud-Native Microservices

We all want this kind of service.


You may also like: Istio Service Mesh, the Step-by-Step Guide, Part 1: Theory

Microservices need to be decoupled, flexible, operationally transparent, data-aware and elastic. Most material from last year only discusses point-to-point architectures with tightly coupled and non-scalable technologies like REST / HTTP. This blog post takes a look at cutting edge technologies like Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Envoy, Linkerd and Istio to implement a cloud-native service mesh to solve these challenges and bring microservices to the next level of scale, speed, and efficiency.

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Visualizing the Istio Service Mesh Using Kiali

Kiali lets you monitor, visualize, and configure the Istio Service Mesh from within a single user interface. Kiali lets you view configurations, monitor traffic flow between services, and analyze traces. It provides visibility into features likes service health, request routing, circuit breakers, request rate, traffic flow, error rates, and more.

Once you have a number of services deployed inside the service mesh, you will have a number of questions around Istio observability: