Getting Started With Istio
Understanding what a service mesh is and how it can be used effectively in a microservices architecture.
The last few years have brought about immense changes in the software architecture landscape. A major shift that we have all witnessed is the breakdown of large monolithic and coarse-grained applications into fine-grained deployment units called microservices, communicating predominantly by way of synchronous REST and gRPC interfaces, as well as asynchronous events and message passing. The benefits of this architecture are numerous, but the drawbacks are equally evident. Aspects of software development that used to be straightforward in the ‘old world’, such as debugging, profiling and performance management, are now an order of magnitude more complex. Also, a microservices architecture brings its own unique challenges. Services are more fluid and elastic, and tracking of their instances, their versions and dependencies is a Herculean challenge that balloons in complexity as the service landscape evolves. To top this off, services will fail in isolation, further exacerbated by unreliable networks. Given a large enough system, parts of it may be suffering a minor outage at any given point in time, potentially impacting a subset of users, quite often without the operator’s awareness. With so many ‘moving parts’, how does one stay on top of these challenges and ensure the system is running smoothly without impacting the customer and driving the developers out of their wits?
With the increased adoption of microservices, the industry has been steadily coming up with patterns and best-practices that have made the entire experience more palatable. Resiliency Patterns, Service Discovery, Container Orchestration, Canary Releases, Observability Patterns, BFF, API Gateway… These are some of the concepts that practitioners will employ to build more robust and sustainable distributed systems. But these concepts are just that — abstract notions and patterns — they require someone to implement them somewhere in the system. More often than not, that ‘someone’ is you and ‘somewhere’ is everywhere.