Google, IBM, and Lyft Launch Open Source Project Istio

Istio gives developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage, and monitor networks of different microservices on cloud platforms.

Google, IBM, and Lyft on Wednesday announced the first public release of Istio, an open source service that gives developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage and monitor networks of different microservices on cloud platforms. According to the companies, Istio was created to address the inherent challenges that come with integrating application-based microservices in distributed systems, namely compliance and security.

Oftentimes, developers have to solve distributed system problems by making changes to the application code. Instead, Istio is designed to function as a uniform layer of infrastructure that sits between the application service and the network.

"This uniform layer of infrastructure combined with service deployments is commonly referred to as a service mesh," the companies said in a joint blog post. "Just as microservices help to decouple feature teams, creating a service mesh helps to decouple operators from application feature development and release processes. Istio turns disparate microservices into an integrated service mesh by systemically injecting a proxy into the network paths among them"...