Insights into the History and
Future of Istio

The Current State and Future of the Istio Service Mesh

Cloud native is eating the cloud and open source, and service mesh is still thriving as a critical part of the cloud native technology stack. Istio is one of the most popular service mesh today, and has been open source for over five years since 2017.

This book takes you through the historical motivation for the emergence of the service mesh, the evolution of Istio, and the Istio open source ecosystem. This book provides detailed information on

• The rise of service mesh technology is due to the popularity of Kubernetes, microservices, DevOps, and cloud native architectures.
• The emergence of Kubernetes and programmable proxies, which laid a solid foundation for Istio.
• While eBPF can accelerate transparent traffic hijacking in Istio, it cannot replace the sidecar in the service mesh.
• The future of Istio lies in building a zero trust network based on the hybrid cloud.

With the entry of Istio into CNCF and the introduction of the latest Ambient Mesh, we can expect that Istio will be easier to adopt, and its future will be more extensive.