How does Istio compare to Traefik?

docker kubernetes istio
drewr picture drewr · May 27, 2017 · Viewed 15.9k times · Source

Traefik is a reverse HTTP proxy with several supported backends, Kubernetes included. How does Istio compare?

Answer

Andrew J picture Andrew J · May 31, 2017

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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