Google announced this week that it has submitted Istio, its service mesh project, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google said that it has submitted Istio for the CNCF’s consideration to become an incubating project, but the inference in the announcement is tied more to formality than hope.
Service meshes such as Istio abstract the communication between cloud app microservices to a layer of network infrastructure. The data plane comprises intelligent proxies, or sidecars, which mediate network traffic between microservices. The control plane manages and configures the proxies. Service meshes add resiliency to cloud networks, provide security, and improve visibility to help optimize network performance.
