
Explore microservices on Kubernetes with Istio service mesh and understand traffic routing. Set up the environment with labs and launch a polyglot multi-language application to observe Istio in action.
Microservices have been a boon to developers in simplifying function and accelerating development speeds, but they have also brought new challenges to managing and observing the many and often ephemeral connections that these services generate and use. In this section we learn about some of the pros and cons, and how Istio helps with the challenges.
Deploy Envoy proxy as a high performance, lightweight sidecar that functions as a load balancer. Explore API driven configuration, HTTP/2 and gRPC, mutual TLS, and flow tracing in Istio.
The mixer acts as the policy and telemetry engine, collecting Envoy attributes from client and server connections, and routing data to logging, authentication, or backend adapters via a pluggable model.
Enable secure ingress with the Envoy load balancer in Istio, apply TLS and mutual TLS, then route traffic through the mesh while monitoring metrics and enforcing timeouts and circuit breakers.
Explore request routing and service version routing with Istio to enable canary and blue-green deployments in cloud-native Kubernetes apps, using traffic rules, Pilot, and Envoy for gradual rollouts.
Explore application and service resiliency with failover, load balancing, and availability zone aware strategies in Kubernetes. Learn fault injection, shadowing traffic, and continuous testing to ensure resilience from production-scale failures.
Grab a mini cube installer for a local machine, install kubectl, and set up a Kubernetes environment with VirtualBox and OS-specific methods such as chocolatey, brew, or apt.
Configure an Istio gateway and virtual service to route ingress traffic to product page service, using destination rules with versioned subsets and mutual TLS, then test with minikube and curl.
Join Kumulus Technologies' CTO, Robert Starmer, as he helps you gain a functional understanding of how Istio provides a service mesh on Kubernetes to effectively and efficiently manage microservices-based, cloud-native applications. A series of concise lectures provide the necessary background on Kubernetes' and Istio's architectures and then explains how Istio's features help simplify microservices management complexity for both cloud operators and application developers. The course wraps up with Labs that provide instructions on how to deploy Istio on Kubernetes (with instructions to deploy locally on your laptop or leveraging Google Cloud Platform's GKE), then deploy istio on Kubernetes, and finally deploy and application and manage it's behavior with Istio. This course assumes no prior knowledge of Kubernetes or Istio and will leave you with the fundamental understanding and operational skills to repeatable deploy both k8s and Istio to continue your learning of Istio's functionality.