Open source Istio brings "service mesh" to micro-services architecture
Anyone tracking advancements in cloud software has heard the term “micro services.” Micro-services architecture is the natural evolution of the Service Oriented Architecture, in which applications are composed of multiple services. The micro-services model came about in response to teams employing agile and continuous delivery methodologies to speed up velocity – the rate at which new features are delivered into products.
As monolithic applications transition towards a distributed micro-service architecture, they become more difficult to manage and understand. These architectures need basic services such as:
- Discovery
- Load balancing
- Failure recovery
- Metrics and monitoring
- Complex operational requirements:
- A/B testing
- Canary releases
- Rate limiting
- Access control
- End-to-end authentication
Istio Service Mesh
Istio (https://istio.io/) is an open source project announced May 24, 2017 by Google, IBM, and Lyft that is developing a high-level network fabric to provide key capabilities uniformly across services, regardless of the language in which they are written.
These capabilities fall into four big categories:
- Intelligent routing and load balancing
- Resilience across languages and platforms
- Fleet wide policy enforcement
- In-depth telemetry
At HP many groups are already adopting micro-services and container orchestration technology to deliver products faster and cheaper. The HP Developer Program and the HP CTO Common Web Platform teams are working together with Apigee and the Istio project to implement HP’s requirements around API Management and policy enforcement. This includes integration of HP-ID, the new HP identity management system.
For more information, access the Kubernetes Blog (http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/05/managing-microservices-with-istio-service-mesh.html) or our internal project (https://pages.github.azc.ext.hp.com/gdrs/servicemesh/)