Istio’s Complexity Leads Some Users to Linkerd

Twain Taylor Twain is a guest blogger for Twistlock and a Fixate IO Contributor. He began his career at Google, where, among other things, he was involved in technical support for the AdWords team. His work involved reviewing stack traces and resolving issues affecting both customers and the Support team, and handling escalations. Today, as a technology journalist, he helps IT magazines, and startups change the way teams build and ship applications. Service meshes have been getting quite a bit of attention, and with good reason. By providing reliability, security, and observability at the platform layer, service meshes can play a mission-critical role in Kubernetes applications. But tales of adoption are mixed: some practitioners report shying away from adopting a service meshes due to their apparent complexity, while others report getting them up and running with apparent ease. So which is it? Are service meshes too complex to be worth the effort, or ready for adoption today? In this article I wanted to focus on