Managing Microservices with a Service Mesh : An implementation of a service mesh with Kubernetes and Istio

Sammanfattning: The adoption of microservices facilitates extending computer systems in size, complexity, and distribution. Alongside their benefits, they introduce the possibility of partial failures. Besides focusing on the business logic, developers have to tackle cross-cutting concerns of service-to-service communication which now defines the applications' reliability and performance. Currently, developers use libraries embedded into the application code to address these concerns. However, this increases the complexity of the code and requires the maintenance and management of various libraries. The service mesh is a relatively new technology that possibly enables developers staying focused on their business logic. This thesis investigates one of the available service meshes called Istio, to identify its benefits and limitations. The main benefits found are that Istio adds resilience and security, allows features currently difficult to implement, and enables a cleaner structure and a standard implementation of features within and across teams. Drawbacks are that it decreases performance by adding CPU usage, memory usage, and latency. Furthermore, the main disadvantage of Istio is its limited testing tools. Based on the findings, the Webcore Infra team of the company can make a more informed decision whether or not Istio is to be introduced.