Google Cloud is ready to pass on Istio—its service mesh platform—to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The tech giant made the announcement yesterday during its ongoing IstioCon 2022. The submission to CNCF, if accepted, will complete critical parts of cloud-native infrastructure together with Kubernetes and Knative—two other platforms developed by Google that are also CNCF projects. With access to Istio’s mature technology and an even bigger open-source community once it enters CNCF, the DevOps team of SaaS companies can potentially gain huge benefits from the move.
App developers use service mesh platforms such as Istio for a more flexible release process, for example, during A/B testing, canary deployments, and blue/green deployments. Service meshes also provide availability and resilience through failover, setup retries, circuit breakers, and fault injection.
In terms of security, a service mesh platform is useful in managing the secure TLS (mTLS) connections between services. It provides secure communication via authorization, authentication, and data encryption. More and more IT organizations are also appreciating service meshes as they enable the programmatic deployment of apps and application infrastructure to test automation tools such as Jenkins, Selenium, Artifactory, or Git. With a service mesh in place, developers can manage networking and security policies through source code.
Istio is now being offered as a managed service by more than 20 providers and is a key part of the future of Google Cloud. CNCF is a vendor-neutral, end-user-driven open-source ecosystem. Becoming a CNCF project can push Istio’s development, thanks to the innovations of collaborators who will come on board. With an open-source service mesh solution under the auspices of CNCF, DevOps teams can leverage the platform and enjoy benefits such as better security, faster time to market, and freedom from lock-in.
Moreover, the open-source community at CNCF provides transparency, reliability, and global talent working on improving the platform. This translates to better sharing of ideas, quicker development, and effective troubleshooting when issues arise. DevOps teams can rely on a robust Istio platform to help them focus on adding business value to each service they build in their apps instead of worrying about how these services communicate with all other services. Google has also said that it will “continue to strategically invest in Istio as a key maintainer and through ongoing investment in engineering for upstream contributions.”
“For over 20 years, Google has helped shape the future of computing with its open-source contributions and has invested deeply to unlock innovation for our customers. Istio extends Kubernetes to establish a programmable, application-aware network using the Envoy service proxy. Istio works with both Kubernetes-based and traditional workloads and brings standard, universal traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployments. Finding a home in the CNCF brings Istio closer to the cloud-native ecosystem and will foster continuing open innovation,” said Chen Goldberg, VP of Engineering for Google Cloud.
The world of cloud computing and service mesh platforms has indeed become bigger and more competitive with the anticipated transfer of Istio to CNCF. With 75% of cloud computing workloads and workstations estimated to be delivered in the form of a SaaS model by the end of 2022, the decision of Google Cloud couldn’t be more timely. With Istio, DevOps teams could use a powerful, open-source service mesh platform to create better SaaS products and deliver more value in less time.
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