As enterprises increasingly embrace microservices architectures, the demand for effective service mesh solutions continues to rise. The open-source Istio project has gained significant traction, driven by an active community that fosters rapid innovation. Istio’s extensible framework effectively addresses various enterprise needs, including security, observability, and traffic management.
However, deploying and managing Istio can be daunting, especially for those unfamiliar with microservices infrastructure. The setup process requires intricate configuration, thorough testing, and integration with existing workflows. This complexity can divert developers’ attention from core business objectives and innovation.
To mitigate these challenges, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Solo.io, a leader in service mesh technology. They provide Istio as a preconfigured, seamlessly integrated AWS Marketplace add-on for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This collaboration simplifies the procurement, deployment, and management of Istio, allowing you to harness its robust capabilities with minimal operational effort. This article discusses the benefits of this joint solution for managing microservices workloads on AWS using Istio.
Solo.io: Simplifying Infrastructure Tasks
Istio aims to alleviate infrastructure-related burdens for application developers, facilitating secure deployments, reliable operations, and streamlined analysis of microservices applications. Key features of Istio include:
- Load Distribution: Balances the load on microservices based on factors such as current utilization, including anomaly detection and rate-limiting, along with microservice version management to support strategies like blue/green deployments.
- Secure Communication: Encrypts data before transmission, utilizing enterprise public key infrastructure (PKI) to ensure that only workloads within the same security domain can access the information. Istio also employs short-lived certificates, enhancing security through frequent automatic rotation.
- Metrics Collection: Acquires detailed metrics from each microservice within the mesh, aiding in network performance analysis.
Solo.io complements Istio with a suite of products designed to simplify infrastructure components, enabling developers to focus on business logic. The Gloo Mesh platform streamlines Istio configurations across the microservices landscape, including:
- Multicluster Application Configuration: Allows for uniform configuration application across various Kubernetes clusters.
- Automatic Service Discovery: Facilitates seamless internal communication, supporting applications distributed across multiple geographic locations.
- CI/CD Integration: Simplifies the deployment process by automating application publishing upon development completion, letting developers concentrate on refining business application code.
- Advanced Application Networking: Provides capabilities for external authentication, rate limiting, and HTTP manipulations without modifying the business application code.
- Observability: Offers a unified monitoring view, helping to identify performance bottlenecks and analyze configurations in a simplified format.
Istio as an Amazon EKS Add-on: A Collaborative Solution
Through AWS and Solo.io’s collaboration, Istio is now available as a prepackaged AWS Marketplace add-on for Amazon EKS. This integration incurs no additional costs and is continuously updated with the latest enhancements from Amazon EKS and Istio. Implementing the add-on is straightforward, directly from the Amazon EKS console. The AWS Marketplace allows for easy and secure deployment of third-party software like Istio from trustworthy independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Solo.io. All AWS Marketplace server products undergo continuous vulnerability scanning, ensuring secure software deployments. This vetting process simplifies procurement by pre-approving third-party software, reducing complexity. Both scanning and secure deployments minimize the need for extensive security reviews, enhancing the time to value. The Solo.io Istio Distribution add-on offers several key benefits, including:
- Extensive Testing: Each new version is rigorously tested for compatibility and feature support, ensuring smooth operations.
- Enhanced Security: Every image undergoes multiple scans to verify its safety for production use, and images are stored in the Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) for secure delivery.
- User-friendly Deployment: For those new to Istio, the AWS web UI allows deployment into an EKS cluster in under 60 seconds.
- Seamless CI/CD Integration: Enterprise customers can deploy the Solo.io EKS add-on through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) as part of their CI/CD pipelines without manual intervention.
- Support for Multiple Architectures: The Solo.io EKS Istio add-on images are designed for compatibility with various Amazon EKS node architectures.
- Customizable Installations: The support for JSON schema enables smooth installations on EKS clusters, with options for customization through additional Istio settings during installation.
Istio EKS Add-on in Ambient Preview Mode Available on AWS
The latest advancement is the introduction of the EKS add-on Istio distribution in Ambient preview mode via AWS Marketplace. This mode preserves existing configurations while eliminating sidecars from the service mesh architecture, simplifying operations.
Conclusion
As service mesh technology becomes increasingly mainstream, the industry is moving towards streamlined, accessible solutions that eliminate initial complexities. Amazon EKS offers a powerful solution that simplifies service mesh implementation into a straightforward process, removing the need for extensive architectural planning. This article examined the advantages of integrating Solo.io’s Istio distribution as an AWS Marketplace add-on for Amazon EKS, highlighting benefits in areas such as enhanced security and simplified deployment. For further insights, you can read this excellent resource on Amazon’s onboarding experience here. To keep your learning going, check out this other blog post here. Additionally, you can find great authority on this topic at this link.
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