This project was aimed at designing and implementing a resilient, observable, and secure cloud-native application using Istio on Kubernetes. We successfully demonstrated Istio’s powerful features in traffic routing, security policies, service monitoring, and fault injection, effectively simulating and managing real-world scenarios within a microservices architecture.

• Developed a simple microservices-based application, such as an e-commerce or payment processing system, which included Frontend, Backend API, and Database/Cache services.
• Containerized the services using Docker and deployed them in a Kubernetes cluster, leveraging the benefits of cloud-native technologies.

• Installed and configured Istio in the Kubernetes cluster to manage, secure, and observe the microservices effectively.
• Enabled automatic sidecar injection to ensure seamless communication and management of the services within the Istio service mesh.

• Implemented various traffic routing rules like A/B testing, canary releases, and blue-green deployment using Istio’s VirtualService and DestinationRule.
• Demonstrated effective load balancing and rate limiting to ensure optimal distribution of traffic and resources.

• Secured service-to-service communication with Istio’s mutual TLS (mTLS), enhancing the overall security posture of the application.
• Implemented access control policies to regulate access to the microservices, ensuring that only authorized requests were processed.

• Integrated Istio with prominent monitoring, logging, and tracing tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Kiali, and Jaeger.
• Configured custom dashboards for real-time monitoring and utilized Kiali to visualize service dependencies, significantly improving observability.

• Increased application resilience through the use of Istio’s circuit breaker, retries, and timeouts.
• Employed fault injection to simulate network delays and failures, testing the application’s ability to withstand and recover from adverse conditions.