How a Service Mesh Helps Your Modern Applications – DevOps Series, Part 11

If you’re a developer working on your modern, microservices-based applications, you already have enough on your plate having to deal with your code. As we have discussed in previous posts: containers help you with packaging and dependencies; a scheduler helps scaling out your deployments and making sure they behave as per your declared state; a package manager helps with complex deployments; CI/CD/CD helps automating the whole software lifecycle; and there are other cool tools (like Draft and Telepresence) that help alleviate the complexity of working in this new world.

So, as a community, we are always looking for ways to ease the workflow of DevOps teams, and address some of their challenges with innovative approaches that help their daily activities.

Implementing microservices with containers

Implementing microservices with containers drives the need for additional features. For example:

• Operations teams need a way to deploy a new software release in a phased approach, select some specific traffic (or users), and redirect it to that new version for testing.
• Developers might want to understand how their distributed application behaves under communication delays, or even total failures.
• Quality Assurance teams might want to mirror traffic to their own setup for testing with a copy of real production traffic.
• Operations would like micro-services to communicate among them in a secure way, including authentication, authorization and encryption.

Istio for DevOps Teams

Istio is an open-source service mesh implementation that addresses these challenges and more, so that DevOps teams do not need to re-invent the wheel and implement these types of features inside the applications. Istio offloads these capabilities from DevOps teams, is able to run them at scale, and integrates beautifully with Kubernetes. As a result, Istio helps developers focus on their core application capabilities.

New learning lab focuses on Istio traffic management capabilities

I know that by now you must be really excited about Istio as a service mesh, but of course you want more! You want to know what is the reality behind all this, you want to get your hands dirty. Well, that’s why I am here! Please check my new Learning Lab, specifically focused on Istio traffic management capabilities. It includes a number of use cases, and how you can implement them on a real microservices-based example application.

I can already hear some of you saying you don’t have a Kubernetes cluster to test it. No worries at all… as always, we got you covered! You can reserve a Cisco sandbox for your Istio testing, for up to 1 week, with Kubernetes and Istio already installed, just ready for you to run the use cases described in my new Learning Lab… and for free!

Now you have no excuse… go for it and enjoy!

Any questions or comments please let me know in the comments section below, Twitter or LinkedIn.

See you in my next post, stay tuned!

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