Introducing istiod: simplifying the control plane

Microservices are a great pattern when they map services to disparate teams that deliver them, or when the value of independent rollout and the value of independent scale are greater than the cost of orchestration. We regularly talk to customers and teams running Istio in the real world, and they told us that none of these were the case for the Istio control plane. So, in Istio 1.5, we’ve changed how Istio is packaged, consolidating the control plane functionality into a single binary called istiod.

Istio implements a pattern that has been in use at both Google and IBM for many years, which later became known as “service mesh”. By pairing client and server processes with proxy servers, they act as an application-aware data plane that’s not simply moving packets around hosts, or pulses over wires.

This pattern helps the world come to terms with microservices: fine-grained, loosely-coupled services connected via lightweight protocols. The common cross-platform and cross-language standards like HTTP and gRPC that replace proprietary transports, and the widespread presence of the needed libraries, empower different teams to write different parts of an overall architecture in whatever language makes the most sense. Furthermore, each service can scale independently as needed. A desire to implement security, observability and traffic control for such a network powers Istio’s popularity.

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