Many in the tech industry would be surprised to learn that Istio, an open platform to connect, manage and secure microservices, is only one year old. Developed by Google Inc., IBM Corp. and Lyft Inc., Istio — despite its young age — has received rave reviews from users, according to Aparna Sinha (pictured, left), group product manager of Kubernetes at Google.

“If you think about the ecosystem around Kubernetes … I was looking through those projects and seeing … which are the ones that have the most stars. And there’s actually three projects that stood out as having more than 3000 stars. … And Istio was at the top of that list,” Sinha said.

Sinha and Lew Tucker, vice president and chief technology officer of cloud computing at Cisco Systems Inc., talked with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), founder of Spark Labs, during the KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU event in Copenhagen, Denmark. They discussed Istio, developer productivity and infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Infrastructure and applications divided

So what makes Istio so exceptional? A major complaint of developers is that they don’t want to learn about networking, developer operations, etc., when they could be focusing on their area of expertise. Istio provides a platform for developers to concentrate on tasks within their skill sets and increase their productivity remarkably. By reducing the time developers spend on tasks more suited to other roles, applications can be developed more quickly.

“It’s very much that separation of concern, and Kubernetes has the same principle. It separates the infrastructure from the applications,” Sinha said. “[Istio] allows you to manage those applications at scale, visualize them, make them secure, and to control them in a scalable way, so you’re not writing the service management pieces into the application. And the developer is therefore freed from that burden, and the application operations team can then manage things like distributing certificates or rotating certificates.”

Developers are encouraged to test Istio for themselves, using the documentation from Istio.io. It is similar enough to Kubernetes that the learning curve is not that steep, according to Tucker. Canary deployment also serves as an interesting use case to support routing traffic on the developer’s application, Sinha added.

Tucker encouraged more developers to get involved with Istio, as the more developers try it out, the number of use cases is expanded, and the more they understand what additional services are needed.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE