
Identify the three stakeholders—developers, DevOps, and site reliability engineers—and address how siloed security policies, weak network visualization, and insecure inter-service data challenge microservices reliability and agility.
Explore how a service mesh decouples service communication from the app layer to the infrastructure layer, enabling secure, policy-driven communication via a sidecar Envoy proxy managed by DevOps.
Refresh the OSI reference model and its layers, map L7, L4, and L3 to application, transport, and network roles, and review common protocols like http, https, http2, gRPC, and ftp.
Manage inbound traffic at the edge of the mesh with an ingress gateway, a standalone web proxy. Enable L4-L6 load balancing and open port 80 for http traffic.
Illustrates how a website certificate secures a connection, showing the lock icon, Google's trust services as issuer, and the use of a public key and elliptic-curve algorithm.
Learn how Istio implements mTLS via the Istio agent and envoy sidecar proxies, with the steward (control plane) issuing certificates for mutual authentication and encrypted service-to-service communication.
Explore how Istio enhances load balancing beyond Kubernetes by routing traffic through a virtual service and destination rule, using round-robin across v1 and v2 subsets.
Improve network resiliency for large scale web applications by leveraging Istio's routing, failover, fault injection, circuit breakers, retry timeouts, and traffic mirroring to meet uptime and latency targets.
Explore how Istio retries and timeouts at the virtual service level manage transient errors, using global timeouts, per-try timeouts, and a defined number of attempts.
Apply fault injection in Istio to purposely return errors for selected requests. Configure http status and percentage in a virtual service, and observe effects through the Envoy proxy.
Explore observability with Istio, understand the high level architecture for implementing observability, and review DevOps and SRE tool integrations across enterprises.
Explore Istio observability by collecting application and envoy logs, enabling tracing with Jaeger, and visualizing metrics like cpu usage with Grafana and Prometheus dashboards.
Explore Istio integrations across security, networking, and observability, including identity providers, certificate managers, ingress controllers, gateways, load balancers, and CI/CD tools.
We talk frequently with enterprises of various sizes, regarding their network, security, and observability challenges. There are two common trends that emerge from those conversations:
Most enterprises are using Istio or plan to implement Istio in production soon.
There is a lack of enough experts capable of configuring Istio for enterprises.
Istio is a complex piece of software. It demands a steep learning curve. But DevOps and SREs who understand the basic concepts of Istio and its underlying technology, Envoy, can cross the learning curve with relative ease.
And that is the goal of this course: to make you thorough with the fundamentals of Istio service mesh and help you move up your career ladder.
The modules in this course are thus structured and recorded in a way that they are easy to understand. There are demo videos to make your hands dirty and also make you get started with testing Istio by yourself.
Here’s a glimpse what all topics we’ll cover in the course:
Introduction to service mesh and Istio
Istio components and Envoy proxy
Istio implementation - demo
Zero trust network (ZTN) and mTLS with Istio - demo
Istio Gateway
Load balancing and canary rollouts with Istio - demo
The architecture of Istio and API gateway
Network resiliency features of Istio
Circuit breaking, timeouts and retries, fault injection, traffic mirroring - demo
Istio observability architecture
How to get application logs, Envoy logs, and traces
Jaeger, Prometheus, and Kiali - demo
Istio integrations
The latest Istio ambient mesh
There will be widespread adoption of Istio since it became CNCF-graduated recently. And DevOps and SREs who understand and can implement Istio will be in high demand.
Best of luck!