What is Istio?

Istio is used to create a network of deployed services with load balancing, service-to-service authentication, monitoring, and even more. Istio intercepts all network communication between microservices, Istio includes the following capabilities:

• Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic.
• Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection.
• A pluggable policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas.
• Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress.
• Secure service-to-service communication in a cluster with strong identity-based authentication and authorization.