Microservices have become a favored means of building next-generation applications over the past couple of years, even though broad industry standards and consensus haven't yet been reached.
As opposed to monolithic applications, a microservices architecture conceptualizes an application as a suite of smaller services, usually running in containers, which can be interchanged and updated as desired. The desirable aspects of microservices include continuous delivery, easier testing, parallel development teams and more efficient, business-need driven development of specific features.
Now, the perhaps unlikely trio of Google, IBM and ridesharing service Lyft are collaborating on Istio, an open source project for connecting, securing, managing and monitoring microservices. Istio, in short, focuses on the potentially painful pitfalls that come with decomposing an application. Here are the key details from their joint announcement:
As monolithic applications are decomposed into microservices, software teams have to worry about the challenges inherent in integrating services in distributed systems: they must account for service discovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, end-to-end monitoring, dynamic routing for feature experimentation, and perhaps most important of all, compliance and security.
Istio adds traffic management to microservices and creates a basis for value-add capabilities like security, monitoring, routing, connectivity management and policy. The software is built using the battle-tested Envoy proxy from Lyft, and gives visibility and control over traffic without requiring any changes to application code. Istio gives CIOs a powerful tool to enforce security, policy and compliance requirements across the enterprise.
Istio's first release targets Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration system that emerged from Google. Support will be added for Cloud Foundry, virtual machines and other environments soon, according to the announcement.
The system will provide a "service mesh" that lies between microservices and the network layer. Because Istio operates at this level, no changes to application code are required. Developers will be free to focus on writing better features, leaving distributed computing issues to Istio. Network adminstrators get monitoring data and tools for configuring network unreliability countermeasures automatically.
Istio is designed for incremental adoption, if desired. For example, a company could turn on the monitoring features and add other ones later. New releases are planned for every three months.
Google and IBM bring their experience working with microservices at large scale both internally and for customers. Lyft's contribution, Envoy, has been proven at scale already, managing 100 microservices across 10,000 VMs, handling 2 million requests per second, according to a statement.
Istio's goals are similar to that of Linkerd, another open-source project developing a service mesh for microservices. Like any open source project, Istio's success will rise or fall depending on the amount of corporate support it can draw in its early days. Google, IBM and Lyft may not be a bad start.
"What an odd group, but this may work," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "You have someone with enterprise access someone with a leading cloud and a startup with leverage."
"Now it is all about seeing if more players will join, or this will be an odd attempt to establish an open source standard," Mueller adds. "Still, it's early days for microservices, and enterprise and developers want a widely adopted standard to ensure the viability of their next-gen apps."
One possibility is that Linkerd and Istio end up somehow combining their efforts rather than invent two new wheels in parallel. Istio, for its part, is already drawing additional support from Red Hat, Pivotal, Weaveworks and Tigera.
However things shake out, the bottom line is that both Istio and Linkerd are tackling an important goal in the future development of microservices architectures.
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