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Istio vs Traefik: 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; Traefik: Load Balancer for Microservices. Træfɪk is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease. It supports several backends (Docker, Swarm, Mesos/Marathon, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Zookeeper, BoltDB, Rest API, file...) to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.
Istio can be classified as a tool in the "Microservices Tools" category, while Traefik is grouped under "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy".
"Zero code for logging and monitoring" is the top reason why over 4 developers like Istio, while over 10 developers mention "Kubernetes integration" as the leading cause for choosing Traefik.
Istio and Traefik are both open source tools. It seems that Traefik with 23.2K GitHub stars and 2.4K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K GitHub forks.
Docplanner, Viadeo, and Condé Nast are some of the popular companies that use Traefik, whereas Istio is used by Cuemby, Entelo, and AgFlow. Traefik has a broader approval, being mentioned in 47 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Istio, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.
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.
Pros of Istio
- Zero code for logging and monitoring14
- Service Mesh9
- Great flexibility8
- Powerful authorization mechanisms5
- Ingress controller5
- Full Security4
- Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker4
- Resiliency4
Pros of Traefik
- Kubernetes integration20
- Watch service discovery updates18
- Letsencrypt support14
- Swarm integration13
- Several backends12
- Ready-to-use dashboard6
- Easy setup4
- Rancher integration4
- Mesos integration1
- Mantl integration1
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Cons of Istio
- Performance16
Cons of Traefik
- Not very performant (fast)7
- Complicated setup7
