When crafting a microservices strategy leveraging AWS, companies increasingly require efficiency, achievable through the use of a service mesh.
Istio, an enterprise-grade service mesh, revolutionizes communication between microservices in EKS, EKS Anywhere, and Lambda environments, eliminating the need for extensive code modifications while enhancing application functionality.
Organizations using Istio innovate faster and compete better while ensuring they maintain transparency and security while limiting down-time. One of the latest features added to Istio is ambient mode, which allows users to choose a new, more streamlined sidecar-less architecture.
Learn more in our AWS and ambient mode white paper.
Why Use a Service Mesh With AWS?
Modern AWS applications often consist of distributed microservices, expanding in complexity as companies grow. While AWS handles the virtualization layer and networking, customers shoulder responsibilities for application management and security, which includes tasks like discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring.
Service meshes like Istio help by transparently integrating features such as observability, traffic management, and security. This streamlines operations, reduces time to market, mitigates risk, and enables companies to focus on delivering superior products and services.
How Service Meshes Work
A service mesh acts as an additional layer in applications, enabling the seamless integration of capabilities like observability, traffic management, and security without code alterations. Istio, the industry standard, simplifies complex tasks such as A/B testing, access control, and encryption, streamlining service-to-service communication.
However, Istio’s traditional deployment model using Envoy proxies as sidecars presents limitations including application disruptions, inefficient resource usage, and potential traffic issues.
How Istio Ambient Mode Works
Istio has introduced ambient mode to address limitations and streamline operations. This new mode integrates the mesh data plane directly into existing infrastructure, eliminating the need for sidecar proxies. Operating at the node level, ambient mode preserves Istio’s core features such as zero trust security and traffic management. This enhancement enables faster delivery and scaling of applications, reduces bottlenecks, and significantly cuts costs while simplifying troubleshooting.
Learn More
In our AWS and ambient mode white paper, we explore how Istio’s ambient mode offers a seamless approach to managing service communication, enhancing flexibility and simplifying deployments in large scale complex environments. Download the white paper now.
