Concepts

Concepts help you learn about the different parts of the Istio system and the abstractions it uses.

  • What is Istio?
    • Overview. Provides a conceptual introduction to Istio, including the problems it solves and its high-level architecture.
    • Design Goals. Describes the core principles that Istio's design adheres to.
  • Traffic Management
    • Overview. Provides a conceptual overview of traffic management in Istio and the features it enables.
    • Pilot. Introduces Pilot, the component responsible for managing a distributed deployment of Envoy proxies in the service mesh.
    • Request Routing. Describes how requests are routed between services in an Istio service mesh.
    • Discovery & Load Balancing. Describes how traffic is load balanced across instances of a service in the mesh.
    • Handling Failures. An overview of failure recovery capabilities in Envoy that can be leveraged by unmodified applications to improve robustness and prevent cascading failures.
    • Fault Injection. Introduces the idea of systematic fault injection that can be used to uncover conflicting failure recovery policies across services.
    • Rules Configuration. Provides a high-level overview of the configuration model used by Istio to configure traffic management rules in the service mesh.
  • Security
  • Policies and Telemetry
    • Overview. Describes the design of the policy and telemetry mechanisms.
    • Configuration. An overview of the key concepts used to configure Istio's policy enforcement and telemetry collection features.