Understanding Istio: Advanced Practices in Cloud Native Service Mesh

Achieving Open Source in the Name of Community

In May 2018, with the support of Ant Group, the ServiceMesher community was established. Subsequently, a whirlwind of service mesh swept across China, and the community-led translation work of the official Istio documentation entered a fervent stage.

As time went on, I felt the lack of comprehensive Chinese materials introducing Istio. Therefore, in September 2018, I began conceptualizing a book about Istio and initiated the open-source e-book project “Istio Handbook” on GitHub. Several months later, with the promotion of service mesh technology and the expansion of the ServiceMesher community, I met many friends who were also passionate about Istio and service mesh technology through online and offline activities in the community. We unanimously decided to write an open-source e-book about Istio together, compiling valuable articles and experiences accumulated by the community into a systematic text to share with developers.

In March 2019, under the organization of the community’s management committee, dozens of members volunteered to participate and jointly write this book. In May 2020, to better promote cloud native technology and enrich the technical content shared by the community, we established the Cloud Native Community and incorporated the original ServiceMesher community into it. The content operated by the community also expanded from service mesh technology to a more comprehensive range of cloud native technologies.

In October 2020, the main contributors to this book formed the editorial committee, including myself, Ma Ruofei, Wang Bai Ping, Wang Wei, Luo Guangming, Zhao Huabing, Zhong Hua, and Guo Xudong. With the guidance and assistance of the publisher, we carried out subsequent version upgrades, improvements, and optimizations for this book. After repeated iterations, this book “Understanding Istio: Advanced Practices in Cloud Native Service Mesh” finally met with everyone.

About This Book

After version 1.5, Istio underwent significant architectural changes and introduced or improved multiple features, such as introducing intelligent DNS proxy, new resource objects, and improving support for virtual machines.

This book is based on the new versions of Istio and strives to provide readers with the latest and most comprehensive content while continuously tracking the latest trends in the Istio community. Additionally, many authors of this book are frontline developers or operation engineers with rich practical experience in Istio, providing valuable reference cases for this book.