Ever since Kubecon Austin ’17 I’ve been excited about Istio but every conversation was punctuated by “but it’s not ready for primetime”.
“Did you hear about Istio? It’s this really cool network mesh that helps with security, load balancing/routing, telemetry, the whole shabang!”
“Yeah, it’ll be really cool when it’s ready.”
Well guess what? Today’s the day, Istio is officially 1.0. Some very forward thinking companies have been running it in production for months and helping work out the rough edges.
In my view, Istio is one of the most important technologies of 2018, second only to Kubernetes.
Why engineers are excited about Istio 1.0
The 1.0 milestone means when we talk about the cool security features, the helpful tools for monitoring, or the interesting connectivity abilities we can end by saying “And it’s really cool that it’s ready.”
Istio’s impact on Software development
Before Istio dealing with logging and telemetry, security policies etc all had to happen in the application layer. This means a lot of overhead for engineers just disappeared. Istio follows Kubernetes’ model when it comes to configuration management.
It’s easier to make applications communicate in a secure way, create/enforce policy, and handle networking. Which brings us to how important Istio is for continuous delivery.
Istio’s impact on continuous delivery
Istio’s networking and load balancing capabilities make advanced deployment models more accessible. Things like:
- Canary
- Blue/Green
- Circuit Breaker
- Mirroring
- And lots more
Frequent readers will remember we showed how to use Istio and Helm to build reliable canary releases. Canary is a particularly popular topic now but look forward to mirroring coming up in a big way soon.
Final note
Over 200 engineers are working on Istio with big support from Google and IBM. Codefresh is thrilled to be part of this community and to be building tools that plugin to and expose the functionality of Istio. 1.0 is just a beginning. Get ready for lots more!
