Manage, secure, and observe service-to-service traffic — traffic control, mutual TLS, and telemetry without touching app code.

Welcome to Istio: The Service Mesh for Kubernetes.

Istio is the leading service mesh: a layer that manages communication between your services, adding traffic control, security, and observability to service-to-service calls without changing application code. This free book teaches it from the ground up: the service-mesh model (data plane vs control plane, sidecars), Istio's architecture with istiod and Envoy and xDS, traffic management with VirtualServices and DestinationRules (canaries, mirroring), resilience (timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, fault injection), security with automatic mutual TLS and authorization policies for zero-trust, observability with metrics/tracing/the Kiali service graph, gateways for ingress and egress, performance and the newer sidecar-less ambient mesh, and operating Istio in production. Ten focused chapters with real config and clear diagrams that build directly on Envoy to show how to govern microservice communication from the platform.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — What Istio Is
2. Chapter 2 — The Service Mesh Model
3. Chapter 3 — Architecture
4. Chapter 4 — Traffic Management
5. Chapter 5 — Resilience
6. Chapter 6 — Security
7. Chapter 7 — Observability
8. Chapter 8 — Gateways and the Edge
9. Chapter 9 — Performance and the Ambient Mesh
10. Chapter 10 — Operating Istio and Putting It Together