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  5. Istio vs linkerd

Istio vs linkerd

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

linkerd
linkerd
Stacks132
Followers312
Votes7
Istio
Istio
Stacks2.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes54
GitHub Stars37.6K
Forks8.1K

Istio vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Istio: Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices, by Google, IBM, and Lyft. 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; linkerd: Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices. 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.

Istio and linkerd can be categorized as "Microservices" tools.

Istio and linkerd are both open source tools. It seems that Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than linkerd with 5.01K GitHub stars and 501 GitHub forks.

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Advice on linkerd, Istio

Prateek
Prateek

Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

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.

322k views322k
Comments
lyc218
lyc218

Feb 21, 2020

Needs advice

Envoy proxy is widely adopted in many companies for service mesh proxy, but it utilizes BoringSSL by default. Red Hat OpenShift fork envoy branch with their own OpenSSL support, I wonder any other companies are also using envoy-openssl branch for compatibility? How about AWS App Mesh?

Any input would be much appreciated!

42.8k views42.8k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

linkerd
linkerd
Istio
Istio

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.

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.

Adaptive load-balancing;Fine-grained instrumentation;Abstractions over service discovery;Runtime traffic routing;Tech that's built for scale
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
37.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
8.1K
Stacks
132
Stacks
2.3K
Followers
312
Followers
1.5K
Votes
7
Votes
54
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    CNCF Project
  • 1
    Light Weight
  • 1
    Service Mesh
  • 1
    Fast Integration
  • 1
    Pre-check permissions
Pros
  • 14
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 9
    Service Mesh
  • 8
    Great flexibility
  • 5
    Powerful authorization mechanisms
  • 5
    Resiliency
Cons
  • 17
    Performance
Integrations
No integrations available
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to linkerd, Istio?

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

Express Gateway

Express Gateway

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

ArangoDB Foxx

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Dapr

Dapr

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Zuul

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

Jersey

Jersey

It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

Ocelot

Ocelot

It is aimed at people using .NET running a micro services / service oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports. It manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service.

Micro

Micro

Micro is a framework for cloud native development. Micro addresses the key requirements for building cloud native services. It leverages the microservices architecture pattern and provides a set of services which act as the building blocks

Claudia

Claudia

Claudia helps you deploy Node.js microservices to Amazon Web Services easily. It automates and simplifies deployment workflows and error prone tasks, so you can focus on important problems and not have to worry about AWS service quirks.

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