Meet Istio

“Istio is an implementation of a service mesh. A service mesh is the connective tissue between your services that adds additional capabilities like traffic control, service discovery, load balancing, resilience, observability, security, and so on. A service mesh allows applications to offload these capabilities from application-level libraries and allow developers to focus on differentiating business logic. Istio has been designed from the ground up to work across deployment platforms, but it has first-class integration and support for Kubernetes.

Like many complementary open source projects within the Kubernetes ecosystem, “Istio” is a Greek nautical term that means sail—much like “Kubernetes” itself is the Greek term for helmsman or a ship’s pilot. With Istio, there has been an explosion of interest in the concept of the service mesh, where Kubernetes/OpenShift has left off is where Istio begins.“