AWS App Mesh
Managed service mesh that simplifies monitoring and controlling inter-service communication in microservices
Open-Source Projects
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Secure, connect, and monitor microservices with a transparent service mesh
Istio provides a uniform platform to secure, connect, control, and observe services in Kubernetes and other environments, offering traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry without code changes.
Istio targets developers, operators, and SREs building cloud‑native applications on Kubernetes or other orchestration platforms. It adds a uniform layer that integrates microservices, manages traffic flow, enforces security policies, and aggregates telemetry, all without requiring changes to service code.
The data plane relies on Envoy sidecar proxies for rich L7 routing, circuit breaking, and fault injection, while Ztunnel offers a lightweight Rust‑based proxy for Ambient mesh mode. Istiod serves as the control plane, handling service discovery, configuration distribution, and certificate management. Istio delivers mutual TLS, fine‑grained policy enforcement, and centralized observability. Installation is performed via the istioctl CLI, Helm charts, or an operator, allowing seamless integration into existing clusters.
With its extensive feature set, Istio enables teams to adopt zero‑trust security, progressive delivery patterns, and comprehensive monitoring while keeping the underlying application unchanged.
When teams consider Istio, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Managed service mesh that simplifies monitoring and controlling inter-service communication in microservices
Fully managed service mesh on Google Cloud for traffic management and observability
Enterprise service mesh management platform extending Istio across multi-cloud environments
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Canary Deployments
Gradually shift traffic to new versions while monitoring health, reducing risk of full rollouts.
Zero‑Trust Security
Enforce mutual TLS between all services, ensuring encrypted and authenticated communication.
Circuit Breaking
Automatically isolate failing services to prevent cascading failures and maintain overall system stability.
Centralized Observability
Collect metrics, logs, and traces in a single pane, simplifying performance analysis and debugging.
Istio is a service mesh that adds a transparent layer for traffic management, security, and observability to distributed applications.
Istio installs Envoy sidecars and a control plane (Istiod) into the cluster, using Kubernetes APIs for service discovery and configuration.
Envoy acts as the data‑plane proxy for each service, handling ingress/egress traffic, routing, and telemetry collection.
Ztunnel is a lightweight Rust‑based proxy used in Ambient mesh mode to provide secure connectivity without sidecar proxies.
Community support is available via the Istio website, GitHub Discussions, and the project's Wiki and documentation.
Project at a glance
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