The ReadMe of Istio Succinctly

Service meshes are steadily gaining momentum in cloud-native infrastructure, and they are changing the architecture of modern applications. Out of all the service meshes in the market today, Istio has the richest set of features and capabilities, and hence it overshadows the service mesh landscape. This book aims to serve as a super-condensed, practical walkthrough of Istio. Although this book is short, it packs the core concepts and guidance that you can use to deploy and operate with Istio at scale.

Although Istio does not mandate the host on which it executes, you will find that most organizations deploy Istio on Kubernetes clusters. Therefore, in this book, we will discuss Istio in the context of Kubernetes. It is essential that you have a good understanding of Kubernetes so that you can perform necessary activities, such as deploying services and viewing the logs, with ease. You can refer to our previous Syncfusion title, Kubernetes Succinctly, if you need a quick refresher on Kubernetes before diving into this book.

Other resources for this book are available at the following locations.

The GitHub account for this title consists of three repositories:

• MicroShakeFactory: This is a simple application with two microservices that can interact with each other. The microservices are REST APIs written in TypeScript using Restify, which is a popular Node.js service framework used for building REST APIs. You are not required to understand the intricacies of this application, as we have already published the container images of the microservices to Docker Hub. In this book, we will only create containers with those images, and you are not required to make any changes to the application code.
• Policies: This is the core repository that we will reference throughout this book. It contains all the Istio specifications that we will apply to the mesh as we discuss the various concepts of Istio. In the repository, you will find that the specifications (or manifests) are segregated by chapters of this book into folders, and specifications in a folder are independent from those in other folders.

Note: Throughout our discussion, we will only specify the name of the specification/manifest that you need to apply to your cluster. You will find the specification file inside the folder of the corresponding chapter.

• ExoticFruits: This repository contains a single file from which we will read raw data to demonstrate how you can invoke external APIs from services within the mesh.

Welcome to Istio Succinctly—we hope you enjoy reading this book.