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.

Istio was criticized for a number of issues early in its development, for the large number of components, the complexity of installation and maintenance, the difficulty of debugging, a steep learning curve due to the introduction of too many new concepts and objects (up to 50 CRDs), and the impact of Mixer components on performance. But these issues are gradually being overcome by the Istio team. As you can see from the roadmap released in early 2020, Istio has come a long way.

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