The open source Istio project is ready for prime time with the release of version 1.0, according to announcements by its key developers, Google LLC, IBM Corp. and Red Hat Inc.

Istio is a “service mesh” that enables developers to connect, manage and secure microservices, or components, of applications built using software containers. Launched a little over a year ago, the joint project aims to tame the complexity of managing applications composed of large numbers of microservices by using containers, the lightweight virtual machines that are skyrocketing in popularity.

Organizations are increasingly adopting microservices to make the development process more flexible, but decomposing applications into networks of loosely coupled components introduces new complexity challenges. Istio removes the need for companies to build the operational mechanisms necessary to support a microservices-based application directly into their code. Instead, it provides the ability to set up a connective layer between the individual modules that serves the same purpose but doesn’t require making any major modifications.

“Trouble managing all of these elements at once can be difficult and wreak havoc on security,” wrote Jason McGee, an IBM Fellow and vice president of IBM Cloud, in a blog post to be published today. “By connecting and routing these pieces together, Istio gives developers control back over how their app is operating and where data is routed in the cloud.”

Istio is managed using a set of programmatic controls that provide the ability to configure a load balancer for distributing traffic among application components. It also packs a failover feature to help recover from issues and makes it possible to specify exactly how data should flow throughout the network.

“In its most simplified form, a service mesh can be thought of as an additional application tier that handles gluing all of the components of an application together,” Red Hat Istio Product Manager Brian Redbeard Harrington wrote in a blog post. “Through the intelligent use of proxy servers managed by a control plane, the service mesh can provide service discovery, application tracing and observability, and control the flow of application requests through advanced traffic management.”

Improvements in version 1.0 are focused on improving scalability and complexity management without sacrificing security. The release provides organizations with “the ability to gain a single view of what’s happening within microservices deployed to the cloud, even if their architectures are complex, large and span multiple systems,” IBM’s McGee wrote.  The new release also broadens the range of ways companies can deploy and run containers, including on bare metal servers and parallel-processing computer that offer direct access to graphics processing units.

Aparna Sinha, a group product manager of Kubernetes at Google, and Chen Goldberg, director of engineering at Google, highlighted some of the reasons why Istio is popular with developers during an interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, at last week’s Google Cloud Next in San Francisco:

Istio’s usefulness was further underscored last week when Google made it one of the central components of its new Cloud Services Platform, a new service for developers that lets them run container apps seamlessly on both public, private and on-premises infrastructure.

“With Istio, your DevOps team gets the tools it needs to run distributed apps smoothly,” Google product manager Dan Ciruli wrote in a blog post. “Istio does canary rollouts, letting you smoke-test a new build to make sure it’s performing well before ramping up. It also offers fault-injection, retry logic and circuit breaking so DevOps teams can keep applications up and running.”

New features introduced in Istio 1.0 include better handling of role-based access controls, improved transport layer security and several new and refactored test suites, Red Hat’s developers said.

Istio is available to use now on Google’s cloud platform and will be available as a tech preview in the new Red Hat OpenShift 3.10 release. The software can also be downloaded directly from GitHub.

Additional reporting by Paul Gillin

Image: Istio/Twitter