Expect to hear a lot more about Istio, an emerging open source technology for orchestrating microservices networking. The buzz is already building, says Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cisco's cloud platform and solutions group.
Istio manages coordination between components of software written in microservices, across multiple private and public clouds. Istio helps developers build big enterprise-class applications that run across private data centers, as well as public cloud providers such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG).
As monolothic applications are decomposed into microservices, the number of components proliferate, which makes getting everything to work together a complex problem. "You need some way to orchestrate microservices and which services do they bind to," Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)'s Compton said in an interview with Light Reading in June.
Istio provides "networking for microservices," Compton said. It's a layer of infrastructure between a service and the network, also known as a "service mesh."
Istio routes calls between microservices over the network, applying policies to ensure smooth operations, Compton says. "An enterprise could say 'these are the microservices that are allowed to call services in Google Cloud, these are the microservices that are allowed to access my ERP service.'" Istio provides a common, uniform replacement for random REST APIS and encrypted HTTP connections, Compton says.
Cisco has been seeing keen interest in Istio from its customers, comparable to the early days of Kubernetes, Compton says. "Kubernetes has evolved to pretty much the de facto standard. Istio may be on the same trajectory, but a bit earlier."
Google, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Lyft Inc. launched Istio in May 2017. At the time, Google explained it as "a uniform way to help connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices."
— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading
This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on Telco Transformation's sister site, Light Reading. To see the full story, click here.