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A versatile proxy for microservice architectures
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The microservices architecture that has become so popular lately offers a number of benefits, including agile development. If the individual parts of an application no longer have to be squeezed into the release cycle of a large monolithic product, development becomes far more dynamic.
However, if you suddenly have to deal with – from the developers' point of view – many small components, you have to define interfaces that talk to each other. All of a sudden topics such as load balancing, fault tolerance, and security start to play a significant role. Service mesh solutions such as Istio, which I reviewed in an earlier article [1], are currently enjoying great popularity, promising admins an automated approach to networking.
As a closer look at the Istio architecture (Figure 1) reveals, the Envoy open source component is the core of the solution and confers most of the functionality. Fundamentally, Istio is a dynamic configuration framework that feeds Envoy settings for a specific environment.
Figure 1: Envoy is the classic tool when it comes to Istio, but it is far more than an Istio add-on. © Mateo Burillo
Accordingly, the Istio developers refer to Envoy as a sidecar, but if
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