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As enterprises migrate from traditional VM infrastructures to more agile microservice-based deployments on container platforms, there is a need for a simplifying technology that can take care of common cross-cutting capabilities around service communication and management such as secure interconnect, service discovery & load balancing, staged rollouts, A/B testing, intelligent rate limiting, authentication, access control, monitoring, logging, etc.

Towards this goal, we are designing Istio, an open platform-independent service mesh that takes care of traffic management, policy enforcement, rate limiting, and telemetry collection. It allows application developers to focus on the business logic and iterate quickly on new features by managing how traffic flows across their services. And it simplifies the operators' job of enforcing various policies and monitor the mesh from a central control point, independent of the evolution of the application ensuring continuous compliance with policies of the organization/business unit.