# Istio Proxy

The Istio Proxy is a microservice proxy that can be used on the client and server side, and forms a microservice mesh. The Proxy supports a large number of features.

Client Side Features:

- *Discovery & Load Balancing*. The Proxy can use several standard service discovery and load balancing APIs to efficiently distribute traffic to services.

- *Credential Injection*. The Proxy can inject client identity, either through connection tunneling or protocol-specific mechanisms such as JWT tokens for HTTP requests.

- *Connection Management*. The Proxy manages connections to services, handling health checking, retry, failover, and flow control.

- *Monitoring & Logging*. The Proxy can report client-side metrics and logs to the Mixer.

Server Side Features:

- *Rate Limiting & Flow Control*. The Proxy can prevent overload of backend systems and provide client-aware rate limiting.

- *Protocol Translation*. The Proxy is a gRPC gateway, providing translation between JSON-REST and gRPC.

- *Authentication & Authorization*. The Proxy supports multiple authentication mechanisms, and can use the client identities to perform authorization checks through the Mixer.

- *Monitoring & Logging*. The Proxy can report server-side metrics and logs to the Mixer.

To learn more...

- User guide coming soon!
- [Contributing to the project](./CONTRIBUTING.md)

### Filing issues

If you have a question about an Istio proxy or have a problem using one, please
[file an issue](https://github.com/istio/proxy/issues/new).