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Istio

Stacks945

Followers1.5K

+ 1

Votes54

linkerd

Stacks129

Followers312

+ 1

Votes7

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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.

Decisions about Istio and linkerd

Prateek Mittal

Chose

Istio

over

Kong

Traefik

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 Istio

Pros of linkerd

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

3
CNCF Project
1
Service Mesh
1
Fast Integration
1
Pre-check permissions
1
Light Weight

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Cons of Istio

Cons of linkerd

17
Performance

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- No public GitHub repository available -

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 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.

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Jobs that mention Istio and linkerd as a desired skillset

Staff Software Engineer, Configuration Management

San Francisco, CA, US; , US

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+10

Backend Agent Engineer, Observability

Postman

, United States

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What companies use Istio?

What companies use linkerd?

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What tools integrate with Istio?

What tools integrate with linkerd?

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What are some alternatives to Istio and linkerd?

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.

AWS App Mesh

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh based on the Envoy proxy that makes it easy to monitor and control containerized microservices. App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and helping to ensure high-availability for your applications. App Mesh gives you consistent visibility and network traffic controls for every microservice in an application. You can use App Mesh with Amazon ECS (using the Amazon EC2 launch type), Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes on AWS.

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Istio vs linkerd

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Pros of Istio

Pros of linkerd

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Cons of Istio

Cons of linkerd

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What is Istio?

What is linkerd?

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What companies use Istio?

What companies use linkerd?

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What tools integrate with Istio?

What tools integrate with linkerd?

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