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Conduit

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Conduit vs Istio: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Conduit and Istio are both service mesh solutions that offer various features for managing and securing microservices architectures. However, there are key differences between the two that are important to understand when choosing between them.

  1. Proxy Technology: Conduit uses a lightweight data plane proxy called Linkerd, which is designed for minimal resource consumption and fast performance. On the other hand, Istio uses Envoy, a highly extensible and powerful proxy that provides advanced routing and load balancing capabilities.

  2. Control Plane Architecture: Conduit follows a simpler control plane architecture with most of the logic embedded directly in the proxy. In contrast, Istio has a more complex control plane setup with separate components such as Pilot, Mixer, and Citadel for policy enforcement, telemetry, and security.

  3. Programming Language Support: Conduit is written in Rust and Go, making it suitable for environments with a preference for these languages. In comparison, Istio is primarily written in C++ and Go, which may require different skills for customization and contributions.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Istio has a larger and more active community, which results in a broader range of integrations, extensions, and support resources. Conduit, being a newer project, may have a smaller ecosystem and fewer third-party tools available for adoption.

  5. Performance Overhead: Due to its lightweight proxy, Conduit is known for its minimal performance overhead compared to Istio, which, with its feature-rich proxy and control plane components, may introduce a higher resource utilization and latency.

  6. Adoption and Maturity: Istio is a more mature project with a longer history of development and deployment in production environments, offering proven scalability and reliability. Conduit, as a newer project, may still be evolving in terms of features, stability, and adoption rates.

In Summary, Conduit and Istio differ in proxy technology, control plane architecture, programming language support, community size, performance overhead, and adoption maturity levels.

Decisions about Conduit and Istio
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 287.7K 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 Conduit
Pros of Istio
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    • 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 Conduit
    Cons of Istio
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 16
        Performance

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      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Conduit?

      Conduit is a lightweight open source service mesh designed for performance, power, and ease of use when running applications on Kubernetes. Conduit is incredibly fast, lightweight, fundamentally secure, and easy to get started with.

      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.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

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

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      What are some alternatives to Conduit and Istio?
      Conductor
      Conductor is an orchestration engine that runs in the cloud.
      Kubernetes
      Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
      Docker Compose
      With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.
      Rancher
      Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
      Docker Swarm
      Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.
      See all alternatives