Istio Playground

Welcome to the Istio Playground!

We're so excited to have you here. This playground is the perfect place to explore and practice using Istio, one of the leading open-source service mesh platforms.

What is Istio?

Istio is a service mesh that provides a central point of control for managing the communication between microservices that make up your application. 

What is a Service Mesh?

You can think of a service mesh as a network of roads. Just like a real-world road network, a service mesh provides a way for different microservices to find and connect to each other. It allows them to exchange information and coordinate their actions. The service mesh also provides tools for securing this communication, ensuring that only authorized services and users can access the network.

Istio is a platform-independent service mesh. This means that it can be used with any platform that supports the use of containers. However, it is commonly used with Kubernetes - the most popular container orchestration platform.

Istio Components

An Istio service mesh is split into two components: a data plane and a control plane.

The data plane consists of sidecar proxies. The sidecar proxy is a lightweight software component that runs alongside each microservice of your application. This proxy intercepts and manages the network traffic between the microservices. In Istio, the sidecar proxy capability is implemented by Envoy - the popular open-source service proxy.

The control plane acts as a configuration and management layer that gives instructions to the sidecar proxies in the data plane. It is also responsible for applying and enforcing the policies and configurations that you define for your application.

Playground Features

This playground comes with a single-node Kubernetes cluster along with the Istio service mesh.

Playground Note

Please note that you can use the playground for 1 hour. If required, you can extend the usage by 15 minutes by clicking on the icon next to the timer icon. 

At the top of the command line, you will see two links: Istio Docs & Kiali Dashboard. Clicking on the Istio Docs link will take you to the official Istio documentation. And clicking on the Kiali Dashboard will take you to a web-based user interface that provides an overview of the structure and health of the Istio service mesh.

So why wait? Dive right in and start exploring Istio today.

Courses

Want to learn more about Istio? Be sure to check out our course Istio Service Mesh.