Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Istio 1.5 is out. Istio took a very bald and big move. Istio decided to move away from microservices. Considering istio use case it makes lots of sense. As you go with microservice architecture you have several advantages like autonomy, use the best tool for the job(different languages), scale components independently, isolation and many others. However, microservices are not a free lunch and there is a downside from it. One of them is the DevOps engineering price to configure, provision, monitor and maintain several isolated services. The other one is complexity. Microservices are more complex than monolith systems. Istio took the move and went to from the microservices architecture with 5 services(Pilot, Cidatel, Telemetry, Policy, Galley, Injector) into 1 single service called istiod. This move made lots of sense.  Not only because it removed complexity but also make configuration, installation and upgrade much easier. I',m sure this move will drive more adoption.

Innovation is a must have for companies today and work with the product mindset. Given the digital transformation, we live in, having a product mindset is more than delivering software but it is empowering teams and working with OKR-based management models that focus on Business Objectives rather than what teams have to do. Development teams are motivated by challenges and they should have the freedom to make choices. But these choices can often have a very high cost for the business and low return. Cloud usage is certainly a great disruptive force for all digital businesses.  There are many ways to architect Cloud-Native solutions (get the most out of cloud) often for a short-term view many companies are opting for Managed Services solution. These solutions, which are often database solutions, but not limited to the database, give a lot of speed for software development but bring two major problems in the long run.

Besides all network overhead, Istio offers very interesting trade-off for sacrificing latency and network overhead for developer productivity and stack independence. In previous posts, I blogged a lot about kubernetes , Istio, Aws, Kops , Eksctl and EKS. Today I will show how to run Istio in AWS using EKS. Keep in mind EKS don't support Alpha* Specs right now(v1,v2 or v3) so some demos from the istio best selection of slideware won't work. But is possible to have istio installed and booking app running.

In previous posts, I show how to run Istio in Minikube and with Docker-Compose/Consul in local env, today I will show how to run on AWS using KOPS. This installation is Linux based(Ubuntu), I'm running all commands from my local-desktop, if you don't use Linux(shame on you) you can create a virtual-machine on AWS with ubuntu and run this commands there, also is possible to run Vagrant with Linux and them run this commands on Vagrant box as well. Istio runs smoothly in AWS with Kops. You don't need much, pretty much 3 machines(1 master node, 2 minions).  Keep in mind this is not a production-grade setup, for production, you should be running with 3 masters at least for High Availability.

In my previous post , I showed how o install and run istio locally with minikube. However, if you don't have 8GB of ram FREE it might not be a good FIT for you. Today I want to show a lightweight approach for a local environment where we can run Istio with Docker, Docker-Compose, and Consul . I will be doing more posts about istio, this week, talking about how to run Istio on AWS for instance. But going back to this post. In order to have this solution working in your machine you have some pre-requirements such as: have docker installed , docker-compose installed and kubectl installed .  Running with consult and docker-compose is way easier than running with minikube/kubernetes however you are not as close as the production topology. For istio, we will be using istio version 1.0.5 Let's get started!

Istio is the new standard for microservices in Kubernetes . Around 2014 Netflix defined before everybody else how to do proper microservices using they brand new stack called NetflixOSS . Introducing game-changing concepts for the Cloud Native microservice components such as Mid-tier load balancing, fault tolerance, circuit breaking, retry/timeouts, service registry and discoverability and much more. NetflixOSS was super important and still is in the cloud-native microservices world. Today the great majority of companies who do Java development use