Google, IBM, Lyft Announce Alpha Release of Open-Source Project Called Istio

Google, IBM and Lyft this week announced the alpha release of Istio, an open-source project that provides a uniform way to help connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices.

Istio encapsulates the best practices Google has been using to run massive-scale services in production.

“We’re happy to contribute this to the community as an open solution that works with Kubernetes; on-premises or in any cloud, to help solve challenges in modern application development,” says Varun Talwar, Product Manager, Cloud Service Platform. “Istio provides developers and devops fine-grained visibility and control over traffic without requiring any changes to application code and provides CIOs and CSOs the tools needed to help enforce security and compliance requirements across the enterprise.”

Istio is a layer of infrastructure between a service and the network that gives operators the controls they need and frees developers from having to solve distributed system problems in their code. Istio is designed to run in any environment on any cloud.

“Based on years of practical experience running container-based systems and working with enterprise clients, I’ve found that as developers adopt microservice architectures, they need a consistent way to connect, secure and manage the applications they are building”, said Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO, IBM Cloud Platform.

The service mesh empowers operators with policy control and decouples them from feature development and release processes, providing centralized management regardless of the scale and velocity of application

“Today, you can manually install and use Istio on Google Container Engine; in the future, we intend to provide a more automated and integrated experience,” said Talwar. “We’re excited about the future of microservices and API development built on Istio and Google Cloud.”