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Istio vs Kiali: What are the differences?
- Traffic Management: The key difference between Istio and Kiali is that Istio focuses on traffic management, providing features like load balancing, routing, and traffic splitting, while Kiali focuses more on observability and monitoring of the services within the mesh.
- Service Visualization: Istio offers service visualization capabilities, allowing users to see how services are connected and communicate within the mesh, while Kiali provides detailed visualizations of service dependencies, traffic flow, and performance metrics, enabling users to better understand the relationships between different services.
- Security Features: Istio offers robust security features such as mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) for secure communication between services, while Kiali does not provide specific security features and focuses more on monitoring and visualization aspects.
- Policy Enforcement: Istio enables the implementation of policies for access control, rate limiting, and authentication at the service level, whereas Kiali does not have native policy enforcement capabilities and mainly focuses on monitoring and visualization.
- Integration with Prometheus and Grafana: Istio seamlessly integrates with monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana for collecting metrics and creating dashboards, while Kiali works well with Istio to provide enhanced visibility but does not offer direct integrations with these monitoring tools.
- Control Plane Functionality: Istio includes its control plane components for managing traffic, policies, and security within the mesh, while Kiali relies on Istio's control plane for data collection and visualization but does not have its control plane functionality.
In Summary, Istio primarily focuses on traffic management, security, and policy enforcement within the service mesh, while Kiali specializes in service visualization, monitoring, and observability features.
Decisions about Istio and Kiali
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 320.4K 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 Kiali
Pros of Istio
- Zero code for logging and monitoring14
- Service Mesh9
- Great flexibility8
- Resiliency5
- Powerful authorization mechanisms5
- Ingress controller5
- Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker4
- Full Security4
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Cons of Istio
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Cons of Istio
- Performance17
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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.
What is Kiali?
It is an observability console for Istio with service mesh configuration capabilities. It helps you to understand the structure of your service mesh by inferring the topology, and also provides the health of your mesh.
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What are some alternatives to Istio and Kiali?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kong
Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.