We are excited to announce that Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is now generally available.
Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides a seamless installation of Istio, automatic updates, lifecycle management of Istio control plane components, and integration with platform logging and monitoring tools. With managed Istio, your service mesh is carefully tuned for optimal performance in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.
With one click, you can get all Istio core components and additional tracing, monitoring, and visualization tools up and running. Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is offered as a managed add-on, so IBM Cloud automatically keeps all your Istio components up to date. IBM Cloud uses the new Istio Operator along with Operator Lifecycle Manager to seamlessly deliver and manage the service mesh components to your cluster.
What is Istio?
Istio is a service mesh. The features of Istio can be broken down into these four categories:
- Security: Enable mTLS between services in the cluster. Istio provides strong identity-based authentication, authorization, and encryption between microservices.
- Traffic management: Control the traffic between your microservices to perform traffic splitting, fault-injection, failure recovery, and canary releases.
- Observability: Collect and view metrics and logs for better visibility into the applications running in your cluster.
- Policies: Enforce access controls, rate limits, and quotas to protect your applications.
For a deeper look into Istio and its benefits, see “What is Istio?” and my video “Istio Service Mesh Explained”:
Developers love Istio!
Why? Because Istio is able to provide its features without developers having to make any modifications to their applications. Istio makes the network smarter—this means that your developers don’t have to add logic to handle encryption, security, versioning, and telemetry into their applications. The applications can be true microservices—small and focused on only the business logic.
IBM and Istio
The Istio open source project was launched in 2017 and IBM was one of the founders, along with Google and Lyft. Today, it’s ranked #4 in fastest-growing open source project by Github contributors. The community is strong, with contributors from over 50 companies. IBM is the second highest contributor to Istio and leads several Istio Working Groups. All this to say, IBM knows Istio, and we’re here to help you use it.
Managed Istio
Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides a simple user experience of adding Istio into your cluster. The Istio installation is tuned to perform optimally on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and is pre-configured to work out of the box with IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA and IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig.
To add Istio 1.4 to your 1.16 cluster, visit the Add-ons tab and click on Install.
Check out our documentation to get started with Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.
If you have any questions or have any feedback to share, please engage our team via Slack by registering here and join the discussion in the #general or #managed_istio_knative channels on our public IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Slack.