The Istio Blog

Canary Deployments using Istio

One of the benefits of the recently announced Istio project is that it provides the control needed to deploy canary services. The idea behind canary deployment (or rollout) is to introduce a new version of a service by first testing it using a small percentage of user traffic, and then if all goes well, increase, possibly gradually in increments, the percentage while simultaneously phasing out the old version. If anything goes wrong along the way, we abort and rollback to the previous version. In its simplest form, the traffic sent to the canary version is a randomly selected percentage of requests, but in more sophisticated schemes it can be based on the region, user, or other properties of the request.

Depending on your level of expertise in this area, you may wonder why Istio’s support for canary deployment is even needed, given that platforms like Kubernetes already provide a way to do version rollout and canary deployment. Problem solved, right? Well, not exactly. Although doing a rollout this way works in simple cases, it’s very limited, especially in large scale cloud environments receiving lots of (and especially varying amounts of) traffic, where autoscaling is needed.


Istio Auth: secure by default service to service communications

Conventional network security approaches fail to address security threats to distributed applications deployed in dynamic production environments. Today, we describe how Istio Auth enables enterprises to transform their security posture from just protecting the edge to consistently securing all inter-service communications deep within their applications. With Istio Auth, developers and operators can protect services with sensitive data against unauthorized insider access and they can achieve this without any changes to the application code!

Istio Auth is the security component of the broader Istio platform. It incorporates the learnings of securing millions of microservice endpoints in Google’s production environment.


Introducing Istio: A robust service mesh for microservices

Google, IBM, and Lyft are proud to announce the first public release of Istio: an open source project that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices. Our current release is targeted at the Kubernetes environment; we intend to add support for other environments such as virtual machines and Cloud Foundry in the coming months. Istio adds traffic management to microservices and creates a basis for value-add capabilities like security, monitoring, routing, connectivity management and policy. The software is built using the battle-tested Envoy proxy from Lyft, and gives visibility and control over traffic without requiring any changes to application code. Istio gives CIOs a powerful tool to enforce security, policy and compliance requirements across the enterprise.


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