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Traefik is a reverse HTTP proxy with several supported backends, Kubernetes included. How does Istio compare?
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Protocol Support. Traefik has the best HTTP/2 and gRPC support we have tested. Some of our requirements include TLS termination, header-based routing, high performance, and stability, on a scale of over 10k concurrent connections. Traefik has performed much better than NGINX and Istio for this use case.
Traefik Mesh is a straight-forward, easy to configure, and non-invasive service mesh that allows visibility and management of the traffic flows inside any Kubernetes cluster.
Traefik is obviously slower than Nginx, but not so much: Traefik can serve 28392 requests/sec and Nginx 33591 requests/sec which gives a ratio of 85%.
Istio enables organizations to secure, connect, and monitor microservices, so they can modernize their enterprise apps more swiftly and securely. Istio manages traffic flows between services, enforces access policies, and aggregates telemetry data, all without requiring changes to application code.
It's something of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Edge proxies like Traefik or Nginx are best compared to Envoy - the proxy that Istio leverages. An Envoy proxy is installed automatically by Istio adjacent to every pod.
Istio provides several higher level capabilities beyond Envoy, including routing, ACLing and service discovery and access policy across a set of services. In effect, it stitches a set of Envoy enabled services together. This design pattern is often called a service mesh.
Istio is also currently limited to Kubernetes deployments in a single cluster, though work is in place to remove these restrictions in time.
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As Mark O'Connor responded, Istio is not just a load balancer or reverse proxy for K8S. Its a full microservice mesh, for inter-microservice communication as well as API management at the edge, with extensive support for monitoring and security (authn/authz). Please take a look at here for more information.
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