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Istio pros and cons

Vendor: Isito
4.1 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1

Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Istio is highly valued for its load balancing, service application, and monitoring capabilities, including the health management of services.
Users appreciate its ease of use and simplicity, making network troubleshooting more efficient.
It offers powerful traffic management features, such as traffic routing and Sidecar injection, which enhance application security.
The mutual TLS feature ensures secure communication between services within the cluster, along with telemetry and tracing tools.
It provides cost efficiency by being free of charge while offering comprehensive security and traffic management functionalities.

CONS

Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples, making it challenging for beginners.
Users with limited experience in infrastructure management and networking might find learning Istio challenging, despite available documentation.
Istio has performance issues, which can lead to overhead in applications with strict time constraints.
Reducing latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial for Istio.
Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, and Istio could improve fault tolerance through horizontal scaling.
 

Istio Pros review quotes

PatrickHaggerty - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 28, 2024
Istio makes all that much easier - traffic splits, percentage traffic splits, doing some sort of chaos testing to see how it works.
reviewer2538315 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 26, 2024
The initial setup is pretty straightforward.
Redentor Del Rosario - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 3, 2024
We can implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple service instances. Istio also offers traffic routing capabilities and circuit-breaking functionality. For security, it handles authentication using mutual TLS (mTLS) between services. It can authorize services using JWT tokens. Istio also allows defining policies for rate limiting to control traffic within services.
Learn what your peers think about Istio. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2025.
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reviewer1319007 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 16, 2021
The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services.
JETTI DINESH REDDY - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 5, 2024
The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable.
Prince Swarnkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 2, 2024
The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting.
Moole Muralidhara Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2025
What I find particularly valuable about Istio is that it is free of cost.
PRABHAT_MISHRA - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 27, 2024
The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application.
Prakash Kumar Prabhat - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 27, 2024
We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.
Suresh Ayyavoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 24, 2023
Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting.
 

Istio Cons review quotes

PatrickHaggerty - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 28, 2024
I've seen applications where they had such strict time constraints, they couldn't use Istio because it was too much overhead.
reviewer2538315 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 26, 2024
Istio has issues with performance.
Redentor Del Rosario - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 3, 2024
Based on my experience, the solution could be improved. They could simplify the learning process so that users can understand how its features work together, especially with components like Kibana. Learning about the different components is necessary. For instance, you need to understand the traffic flow, potential bottlenecks, and the architecture within Istio.
Learn what your peers think about Istio. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1319007 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 16, 2021
For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked.
JETTI DINESH REDDY - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 5, 2024
Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
Prince Swarnkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 2, 2024
If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning.
Moole Muralidhara Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 14, 2025
It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production.
PRABHAT_MISHRA - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 27, 2024
Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly.
Prakash Kumar Prabhat - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 27, 2024
It would be good if the solution had more community forums.
Suresh Ayyavoo - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 24, 2023
If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio.