On February 9, Istio announced the release of Istio 1.9. In this release, we can see the wider adoption of VMs into the service mesh, and even better VM support, cert issuance to VMs, and health checking for the workload entry. Istio’s latest releases, 1.7 and 1.8, made a lot of progress toward making VMs first-class workloads in the mesh, and cert issuance has been the final gap to close.
A service mesh is a relatively simple concept, consisting of a bunch of network proxies paired with each service in an application, plus a set of task management processes. The proxies are called the data plane and the management processes are called the control plane in the Service Mesh. The data plane intercepts calls between different services and “processes” them; the control plane is the brain of the mesh that coordinates the behavior of proxies and provides APIs for operations and maintenance personnel to manipulate and observe the entire network.
In this article, I’ll give you an overview of Istio‘s history of virtual machine integration support. In particular, the introduction of the smart DNS proxy and WorkloadGroup in Istio 1.8, which makes virtual machines and containers equivalent at the resource abstraction level.
Envoy Proxy has announced the release of 1.17. The new version released on Jan. 11, 2021 brought a breaking change: v2 API is deprecated.
1.8 is the last version of Istio to be released in 2020, it keeps following the trade winds and listen to the users’ feedback, which has the following major updates:
The latest Istio releases have been widely anticipated by users who want to extend the service mesh to their legacy workloads. Istio 1.7 laid some of the groundwork to make VMs first-class citizens in the mesh by making VMs look more like a pod in Istio. With its latest 1.8 release, Istio has resolved a key problem with DNS in the service mesh that has stood in the way of expanding the mesh to VMs and enabling seamless multicluster access and has continued to build on the groundwork laid in 1.7 to make VMs easier to enroll in the mesh.
Istio is a popular service mesh to connect, secure, control, and observe services. When it was first introduced as open source in 2017, Kubernetes was winning the container orchestration battle and Istio answered the needs of organizations moving to microservices. Although Istio claims to support heterogeneous environments such as Nomad, Consul, Eureka, Cloud Foundry, Mesos, etc., in reality, it has always worked best with Kubernetes — on which its service discovery is based.
