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Cilium

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54
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Cilium vs Istio: What are the differences?

Cilium and Istio are two popular technologies in the field of networking and service mesh. Let's discuss the key differences between them:

  1. Scalability: Cilium is known for its high scalability with optimized packet processing, enabling it to handle a massive number of connections. On the other hand, Istio provides scalability through its load balancing and traffic management capabilities, allowing for efficient distribution of network traffic.

  2. Security: Cilium focuses on providing network security at the individual workload level. It employs BPF-based technology to enforce fine-grained security policies and protect workloads from network attacks. In contrast, Istio offers a comprehensive security framework that includes features like mutual TLS authentication, access control policies, and secure service communication.

  3. API Support: Cilium provides a powerful native API for managing networking and security policies. Its API allows for programmatic control of fine-grained security rules and powerful network policies. Istio, on the other hand, allows users to control its functionality through its REST APIs and configuration files.

  4. Traffic Management: Istio excels in traffic management capabilities, providing features like load balancing, traffic routing, and canary deployments. It allows for more control over network traffic routing and can integrate with various service discovery mechanisms. Cilium also offers some traffic management capabilities, but it primarily focuses on providing secure network connectivity.

  5. Observability: Both Cilium and Istio offer observability features, but with different approaches. Cilium leverages eBPF technology to collect detailed network metrics, allowing for deep visibility into network traffic. In contrast, Istio provides observability features through its telemetry stack, allowing for monitoring and tracing of service requests across the service mesh.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Both Cilium and Istio have vibrant open-source communities and a wide range of integrations with other technologies. However, Istio has a larger community and ecosystem due to its early adoption by major cloud providers, making it more mature and offering more options for integration with various tools and platforms.

In summary, Cilium focuses on scalability, individual workload security, and provides a powerful native API, while Istio places more emphasis on traffic management, comprehensive security features, and offers a larger community and ecosystem.

Decisions about Cilium and Istio
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 287K views

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

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Pros of Cilium
Pros of Istio
  • 1
    Sidecarless
  • 14
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 9
    Service Mesh
  • 8
    Great flexibility
  • 5
    Resiliency
  • 5
    Powerful authorization mechanisms
  • 5
    Ingress controller
  • 4
    Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker
  • 4
    Full Security

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Cons of Cilium
Cons of Istio
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 16
      Performance

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    What is Cilium?

    Open source software for providing and transparently securing network connectivity and loadbalancing between application workloads such as application containers or processes.

    What is Istio?

    Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

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    What companies use Cilium?
    What companies use Istio?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Cilium or Istio.
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    What tools integrate with Cilium?
    What tools integrate with Istio?

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    What are some alternatives to Cilium and Istio?
    Weave
    Weave can traverse firewalls and operate in partially connected networks. Traffic can be encrypted, allowing hosts to be connected across an untrusted network. With weave you can easily construct applications consisting of multiple containers, running anywhere.
    Envoy
    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
    linkerd
    linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.
    OpenSSL
    It is a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. It is also a general-purpose cryptography library.
    Let's Encrypt
    It is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).
    See all alternatives