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policies on latency of requests (September 15, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/>Large Scale Security Policy Performance Tests</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new deployment model for Istio (August 27, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/new-deployment-model/>Deploying Istio Control Planes Outside the Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The Istio Steering Committee is now in part proportionally allocated to companies based on contribution, and in part elected by community members (August 24, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/steering-changes/>Introducing the new Istio steering committee</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An alternative sidecar proxy for Istio (July 28, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/mosn-proxy/>Using MOSN with Istio: an alternative data plane</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An update on trademarks and project governance (July 8, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/open-usage/>Open and neutral: transferring our trademarks to the Open Usage Commons</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new way to manage installation of telemetry addons (June 4, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/addon-rework/>Reworking our Addon Integrations</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describing the new functionality of Workload Entries (May 21, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/workload-entry/>Introducing Workload Entries</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Simplifying Istio upgrades by offering safe canary deployments of the control plane (May 19, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/multiple-control-planes/>Safely Upgrade Istio using a Canary Control Plane Deployment</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Application Load Balancer to direct traffic to the Istio Ingress gateway with mutual TLS (May 15, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/alb-ingress-gateway-iks/>Direct encrypted traffic from IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Ingress to Istio Ingress Gateway</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Community partner tooling of Wasm for Istio by Solo.io (March 25, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/wasmhub-istio/>Extended and Improved WebAssemblyHub to Bring the Power of WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A mechanism to acquire and share an application certificate and key through mounted files (March 25, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/proxy-cert/>Provision a certificate and key for an application without sidecars</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istiod consolidates the Istio control plane components into a single binary (March 19, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/istiod/>Introducing istiod: simplifying the control plane</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Wasm extensions for Envoy and Istio declaratively (March 16, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/deploy-wasm-declarative/>Declarative WebAssembly deployment for Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The future of Istio extensibility using WASM (March 5, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>Redefining extensibility in proxies - introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A vision statement and roadmap for Istio in 2020 (March 3, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/>Istio in 2020 - Following the Trade Winds</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage secrets (February 20, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/istio-agent/>Remove cross-pod unix domain sockets</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automating Istio configuration for Istio deployments (clusters) that work as a single mesh (January 5, 2020)" href=/v1.7/blog/2020/multi-cluster-mesh-automation/>Multicluster Istio configuration and service discovery using Admiral</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card1 title="Blog posts for 2019." aria-controls=card1-body><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2019 Posts</button><div class="body default" aria-labelledby=card1 role=region id=card1-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card1><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction to Istio's new operator-based installation and control plane management feature (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/introducing-istio-operator/>Introducing the Istio Operator</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/v1beta1-authorization-policy/>Introducing the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage Istio webhooks (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/webhook/>Secure Webhook Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provision and manage DNS certificates in Istio (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/dns-cert/>DNS Certificate Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Getting programmatic access to Istio resources (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/announcing-istio-client-go/>Announcing Istio client-go</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Analyze your Istio configuration to detect potential issues and get general insights (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/introducing-istioctl-analyze/>Introducing istioctl analyze</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure Istio ingress gateway to act as a proxy for external services (October 15, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/proxy/>Istio as a Proxy for External Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Deploy environments that require isolation into separate meshes and enable inter-mesh communication by mesh federation (October 2, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/isolated-clusters/>Multi-Mesh Deployments for Isolation and Boundary Protection</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How can you use Istio to monitor blocked and passthrough external traffic (September 28, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/monitoring-external-service-traffic/>Monitoring Blocked and Passthrough External Service Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to secure multi-cloud Kubernetes applications with zero code changes (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/app-identity-and-access-adapter/>App Identity and Access Adapter</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Demonstrates a Mixer out-of-process adapter which implements the Knative scale-from-zero logic (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/knative-activator-adapter/>Mixer Adapter for Knative</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Taking advantage of Kubernetes trustworthy JWTs to issue certificates for workload instances more securely (September 10, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/trustworthy-jwt-sds/>Change in Secret Discovery Service in Istio 1.3</a></li><li role=none><span role=treeitem class=current title="The design principles behind Istio's APIs and how those APIs are evolving (August 5, 2019)">The Evolution of Istio's APIs</span></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Comparison of alternative solutions to control egress traffic including performance considerations (July 22, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-3/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Use Istio Egress Traffic Control to prevent attacks involving egress traffic (July 10, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-2/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 2</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Tools and guidance for evaluating Istio's data plane performance (July 9, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/performance-best-practices/>Best Practices: Benchmarking Service Mesh Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Learn how to extend the lifetime of Istio self-signed root certificate (June 7, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/root-transition/>Extending Istio Self-Signed Root Certificate Lifetime</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Attacks involving egress traffic and requirements for egress traffic control (May 22, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-1/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 1</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An overview of Istio 1.1 performance (March 19, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/istio1.1_perf/>Architecting Istio 1.1 for Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Istio route rules in a multicluster service mesh (February 7, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/multicluster-version-routing/>Version Routing in a Multicluster Service Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Announces the new Istio blog policy (February 5, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/sail-the-blog/>Sail the Blog!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Verifies the performance impact of adding an egress gateway (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/egress-performance/>Egress Gateway Performance Investigation</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="De-mystify how Istio manages to plugin its data-plane components into an existing deployment (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/data-plane-setup/>Demystifying Istio's Sidecar Injection Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Addressing application startup ordering and startup latency using AppSwitch (January 14, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/appswitch/>Sidestepping Dependency Ordering with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio has a new discussion board (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/announcing-discuss.istio.io/>Announcing discuss.istio.io</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to deploy a custom ingress gateway using cert-manager manually (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.7/blog/2019/custom-ingress-gateway/>Deploy a Custom Ingress Gateway Using Cert-Manager</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card2 title="Blog posts for 2018." aria-controls=card2-body><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2018 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card2 role=region id=card2-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card2><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to use Istio for traffic management without deploying sidecar proxies (November 21, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/incremental-traffic-management/>Incremental Istio Part 1, Traffic Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (November 16, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/egress-mongo/>Consuming External MongoDB Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio hosting an all day Twitch stream to celebrate the 1.0 release (August 3, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/istio-twitch-stream/>All Day Istio Twitch Stream</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How HP is building its next-generation footwear personalization platform on Istio (July 31, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/hp/>Istio a Game Changer for HP's FitStation Platform</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automatic application onboarding and latency optimizations using AppSwitch (July 30, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/delayering-istio/>Delayering Istio with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describe Istio's authorization feature and how to use it in various use cases (July 20, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/istio-authorization/>Micro-Segmentation with Istio Authorization</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to export Istio Access Logs to different sinks like BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver (July 9, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/export-logs-through-stackdriver/>Exporting Logs to BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio for monitoring and access policies of HTTP egress traffic (June 22, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/egress-monitoring-access-control/>Monitoring and Access Policies for HTTP Egress Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1alpha3 routing API (April 25, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/v1alpha3-routing/>Introducing the Istio v1alpha3 routing API</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio ingress with a network load balancer on AWS (April 20, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/aws-nlb/>Configuring Istio Ingress with AWS NLB</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Kubernetes namespaces and RBAC to create an Istio soft multi-tenancy environment (April 19, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/soft-multitenancy/>Istio Soft Multi-Tenancy Support</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An introduction to safer, lower-risk deployments and release to production (February 8, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/traffic-mirroring/>Traffic Mirroring with Istio for Testing in Production</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (February 6, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/egress-tcp/>Consuming External TCP Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (January 31, 2018)" href=/v1.7/blog/2018/egress-https/>Consuming External Web Services</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card3 title="Blog posts for 2017." aria-controls=card3-body><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2017 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card3 role=region id=card3-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card3><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Improving availability and reducing latency (December 7, 2017)" href=/v1.7/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/>Mixer and the SPOF Myth</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provides an overview of Mixer's plug-in architecture (November 3, 2017)" href=/v1.7/blog/2017/adapter-model/>Mixer Adapter Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How Kubernetes Network Policy relates to Istio policy (August 10, 2017)" href=/v1.7/blog/2017/0.1-using-network-policy/>Using Network Policy with Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to create autoscaled canary deployments (June 14, 2017)" href=/v1.7/blog/2017/0.1-canary/>Canary Deployments using Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio Authentication 0.1 announcement (May 25, 2017)" href=/v1.7/blog/2017/0.1-auth/>Using Istio to Improve End-to-End Security</a></li></ul></div></div></div></nav></div><div class=article-container><button tabindex=-1 id=sidebar-toggler title="Toggle the navigation bar"><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#pull"/></svg></button><nav aria-label=Breadcrumb><ol><li><a href=/v1.7/ title="Connect, secure, control, and observe services.">Istio</a></li><li><a href=/v1.7/blog/ title="Posts about using Istio.">Blog</a></li><li><a href=/v1.7/blog/2019/ title="Blog posts for 2019.">2019 Posts</a></li><li>The Evolution of Istio's APIs</li></ol></nav><article aria-labelledby=title><div class=title-area><div style=width:100%><h1 id=title>The Evolution of Istio's APIs</h1><p class=byline><span>By</span>
<span class=attribution>Louis Ryan (Google), Sandeep Parikh (Google)</span><span> | </span><span><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#calendar"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>August 5, 2019</span><span> | </span><span title="1090 words"><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#clock"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>6 minute read</span>
<span>&nbsp;</span>
<span></span></p></div></div><nav class=toc-inlined aria-label="Table of Contents"><div><hr><ol><li role=none aria-label="Evolving Istios APIs"><a href=#evolving-istio-s-apis>Evolving Istios APIs</a><li role=none aria-label="Composability and abstractions"><a href=#composability-and-abstractions>Composability and abstractions</a><li role=none aria-label="Whats coming next"><a href=#what-s-coming-next>Whats coming next</a></ol><hr></div></nav><div><aside class="callout warning"><div class=type><svg class="large-icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#callout-warning"/></svg></div><div class=content>This blog post was written assuming Istio 1.2, so some of this content may now be outdated.</div></aside></div><p>One of Istios main goals has always been, and continues to be, enabling teams to develop abstractions that work best for their specific organization and workloads. Istio provides robust and powerful building blocks for service-to-service networking. Since <a href=/v1.7/news/releases/0.x/announcing-0.1>Istio 0.1</a>, the Istio team has been learning from production users about how they map their own architectures, workloads, and constraints to Istios capabilities, and weve been evolving Istios APIs to make them work better for you.</p><h2 id=evolving-istio-s-apis>Evolving Istios APIs</h2><p>The next step in Istios evolution is to sharpen our focus and align with the roles of Istios users. A security admin should be able to interact with an API that logically groups and simplifies security operations within an Istio mesh; the same goes for service operators and traffic management operations.</p><p>Taking it a step further, theres an opportunity to provide improved experiences for beginning, intermediate, and advanced use cases for each role. There are many common use cases that can be addressed with obvious default settings and a better defined initial experience that requires little to no configuration. For intermediate use cases, the Istio team wants to leverage contextual cues from the environment and provide you with a simpler configuration experience. Finally, for advanced scenarios, our goal is to make <a href=https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-make-the-easy-things-easy-and-the-hard-things-possible>easy things easy and hard things possible</a>.</p><p>To provide these sorts of role-centric abstractions, however, the APIs underneath them must be able to describe all of Istios power and capabilities. Historically, Istios approach to API design followed paths similar to those of other infrastructure APIs. Istio follows these design principles:</p><ol><li>The Istio APIs should seek to:<ul><li>Properly represent the underlying resources to which they are mapped</li><li>Shouldnt hide any of the underlying resources useful capabilities</li></ul></li><li>The Istio APIs should also be <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composability>composable</a>, so end users can combine infrastructure APIs in a way that makes sense for their own needs.</li><li>The Istio APIs should be flexible: Within an organization, it should be possible to have different representations of the underlying resources and surface the ones that make sense for each individual team.</li></ol><p>Over the course of the next several releases we will share our progress as we strengthen the alignment between Istios APIs and the roles of Istio users.</p><h2 id=composability-and-abstractions>Composability and abstractions</h2><p>Istio and Kubernetes often go together, but Istio is much more than an add-on to Kubernetes it is as much a <em>platform</em> as Kubernetes is. Istio aims to provide infrastructure, and surface the capabilities you need in a powerful service mesh. For example, there are platform-as-a-service offerings that use Kubernetes as their foundation, and build on Kubernetes composability to provide a subset of APIs to application developers.</p><p>The number of objects that must be configured to deploy applications is a concrete example of Kubernetes composability. By our count, at least 10 objects need to be configured: <code>Namespace</code>, <code>Service</code>, <code>Ingress</code>, <code>Deployment</code>, <code>HorizontalPodAutoscaler</code>, <code>Secret</code>, <code>ConfigMap</code>, <code>RBAC</code>, <code>PodDisruptionBudget</code>, and <code>NetworkPolicy</code>.</p><p>It sounds complicated, but not everyone needs to interact with those concepts. Some are the responsibility of different teams like the cluster, network, or security admin teams, and many provide sensible defaults. A great benefit of cloud native platforms and deployment tools is that they can hide that complexity by taking in a small amount of information and configuring those objects for you.</p><p>Another example of composability in the networking space can be found in the <a href=https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/https/>Google Cloud HTTP(S) Load Balancer</a> (GCLB). To correctly use an instance of the GCLB, six different infrastructure objects need to be created and configured. This design is the result of our 20 years of experience in operating distributed systems and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5HJ1y6PeyE">there is a reason why each one is separate from the others</a>. But the steps are simplified when youre creating an instance via the Google Cloud console. We provide the more common end-user/role-specific configurations, and you can configure less common settings later. Ultimately, the goals of infrastructure APIs are to offer the most flexibility without sacrificing functionality.</p><p><a href=http://knative.dev>Knative</a> is a platform for building, running, and operating serverless workloads that provides a great real-world example of role-centric,
higher-level APIs. <a href=https://knative.dev/docs/serving/>Knative Serving</a>, a component of Knative that builds on Kubernetes and Istio to support deploying and
serving serverless applications and functions, provides an opinionated workflow for application developers to manage routes and revisions of their services.
Thanks to that opinionated approach, Knative Serving exposes a subset of Istios networking APIs that are most relevant to application developers via a simplified
<a href=https://github.com/knative/docs/blob/master/docs/serving/spec/knative-api-specification-1.0.md#route>Routes</a> object that supports revisions and traffic routing,
abstracting Istios <a href=/v1.7/docs/reference/config/networking/virtual-service/><code>VirtualService</code></a> and <a href=/v1.7/docs/reference/config/networking/destination-rule/><code>DestinationRule</code></a>
resources.</p><p>As Istio has matured, weve also seen production users develop workload- and organization-specific abstractions on top of Istios infrastructure APIs.</p><p>AutoTrader UK has one of our favorite examples of a custom platform built on Istio. In <a href=https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/052-autotrader/>an interview with the Kubernetes Podcast from Google</a>, Russel Warman and Karl Stoney describe their Kubernetes-based delivery platform, with <a href=https://karlstoney.com/2018/07/07/managing-your-costs-on-kubernetes/>cost dashboards using Prometheus and Grafana</a>. With minimal effort, they added configuration options to determine what their developers want configured on the network, and it now manages the Istio objects required to make that happen. There are countless other platforms being built in enterprise and cloud-native companies: some designed to replace a web of company-specific custom scripts, and some aimed to be a general-purpose public tool. As more companies start to talk about their tooling publicly, we&rsquo;ll bring their stories to this blog.</p><h2 id=what-s-coming-next>Whats coming next</h2><p>Some areas of improvement that were working on for upcoming releases include:</p><ul><li>Installation profiles to setup standard patterns for ingress and egress, with the Istio operator</li><li>Automatic inference of container ports and protocols for telemetry</li><li>Support for routing all traffic by default to constrain routing incrementally</li><li>Add a single global flag to enable mutual TLS and encrypt all inter-pod traffic</li></ul><p>Oh, and if for some reason you judge a toolbox by the list of CRDs it installs, in Istio 1.2 we cut the number from 54 down to 23. Why? It turns out that if you have a bunch of features, you need to have a way to configure them all. With the improvements weve made to our installer, you can now install Istio using a <a href=/v1.7/docs/setup/additional-setup/config-profiles/>configuration</a> that works with your adapters.</p><p>All service meshes and, by extension, Istio seeks to automate complex infrastructure operations, like networking and security. That means there will always be complexity in its APIs, but Istio will always aim to solve the needs of operators, while continuing to evolve the API to provide robust building blocks and prioritize flexibility through role-centric abstractions.</p><p>We can&rsquo;t wait for you to join our <a href=/v1.7/about/community/join/>community</a> to see what you build with Istio next!</p></article><nav class=pagenav><div class=left><a title="Taking advantage of Kubernetes trustworthy JWTs to issue certificates for workload instances more securely." href=/v1.7/blog/2019/trustworthy-jwt-sds/><svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#left-arrow"/></svg>Change in Secret Discovery Service in Istio 1.3</a></div><div class=right><a title="Comparison of alternative solutions to control egress traffic including performance considerations." href=/v1.7/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-3/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 3<svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="/v1.7/img/icons.svg#right-arrow"/></svg></a></div></nav><div id=feedback><div id=feedback-initial>Was this information useful?<br><button class="btn feedback" onclick="sendFeedback('en',1)">Yes</button>
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