UPDATED 12:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 26 2018

CLOUD

Google adds Istio to its Kubernetes platform to make microservices easier to manage

Software developers are adopting Kubernetes-based microservices architectures to build modern applications in droves. Now, Google LLC is trying to help developers manage those microservices more easily with the addition of Istio, an open source service mesh, to its enterprise-grade Google Kubernetes Engine platform.

Google has been at the forefront of Kubernetes’ development since the project’s inception. It began life as an internal project at the company called Borg before being released to the open-source community as Kubernetes in 2014. Since then, it has emerged as the de facto tool for orchestrating software containers, which are used to package apps so they can run on any platform, and their microservices, or the components of those apps.

Kubernetes is used to orchestrate multiple clusters of containers so they can be scaled up reliably, but it isn’t able to manage the hordes of microservices running inside of them, which is where Istio comes in.

In a blog post, Eric Brewer, vice president of infrastructure at Google Cloud, and Eyal Manor, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, explained that Istio enables developers to connect, manage and secure those microservices more easily. This is important because microservices are actually loosely coupled components of apps, which means they introduce new complexity challenges to the development process.

“There are lots and lots of collections of services now, not just a single service in each container that Kubernetes took care of,” Brewer told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “Istio manages collections of services: authenticating one service to another [service authorization], and management of loads [load shifting].”

To help understand better what Istio does, it’s helpful to think of software containers as “cars,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

“Kubernetes has built the road but the cars have no idea where they are, how fast they are driving, how they interact with each other or what their final destination is,” he explained. “Enter Istio and enterprises get all of the above. Istio is a logical step for Google and a sign that the next level of deployments is about manageability, visibility and awareness of what enterprises are running. And that transparency is key for CxOs.”

Specifically, what Istio does is it eliminates the need to build the operational mechanisms that are necessary to manage microservice into the application code. Instead, it establishes a connective layer between the individual modules, thereby serving the same purpose but without making any major modifications to the code.

Istio itself is managed using a set of programmatic controls that provides the ability to configure a load balancer for distributing traffic among application components. It also packs a failover feature to help recover from any issues that may cause problems with apps and makes it possible to specify exactly how data should flow throughout the network. Furthermore, it helps ensure consistent polices, which must be decoupled from individual services so that they can be more uniform and updated independently, across those microservices.

In a nutshell, Istio “decouples operational aspects of the services from the implementation of the services,” Brewer explained. As such, Istio is designed to complement Kubernetes rather than replace it, he added.

The introduction of Istio on GKE, which will launch in beta next month, will allow Google’s customers to add a service mesh onto their existing GKE clusters and gather more telemetry data about them. This means users will also be able to monitor the health of those clusters via signals such as traffic, error rates and latency.

Google said it’s planning to enable Istio’s capabilities on some of its other services in the coming months as well, including GKE On-Prem, which is a binary-compatible version of GKE that companies can run in their own private data centers.

“Whether you’re a bonafide cloud-native, or you’re just starting to think about modernizing your IT environment, building your applications on Kubernetes and containers will take you a long way,” Brewer wrote in the blog post. “But you also need to think about how you’ll manage an environment that exceeds your wildest expectations. Istio can take you the rest of the way.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay

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