Introduction
Built on top of Envoy Proxy, Istio provides a robust data plane for handling traffic between services, and a rich control plane to configure policies, manage traffic, and collect telemetry. It enables Cake engineers to implement zero-trust security models, enforce fine-grained routing policies, and analyze system behavior—all while minimizing the operational overhead of service communication.
Key benefits of using Istio in the Cake platform include:
Traffic Management and Resilience: Enables intelligent routing (e.g., canary, A/B testing, blue-green deployments), retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and traffic mirroring to support safe and controlled rollouts.
Security by Default: Facilitates mTLS across all service communication, identity-based authorization, and policy enforcement—enabling zero-trust networking within and across clusters.
Deep Observability: Collects out-of-the-box telemetry—metrics, logs, and traces—for every service interaction, integrating seamlessly with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
Policy and Access Control: Provides fine-grained control over communication with authorization policies, rate limits, and quotas—all managed declaratively through Kubernetes-native resources.
Multi-Cluster and Multi-Tenant Support: Facilitates consistent service behavior across regions or environments, with built-in support for federated service meshes.
In the Cake platform, Istio is deployed to enable a secure, resilient, and insight-driven service mesh that empowers teams to move quickly without compromising reliability or compliance. It acts as the connective tissue between microservices—ensuring consistent enforcement of policies and simplifying the complexity of operating distributed applications.
[Brief overview of the App, Component or Library is and its benefits.]