The cool thing about Istio is that you do not have to modify your current K8s application. You simply need to reroute who your microservices call. So instead of calling another service or message queue; you configure all of your calls to call the envoy proxy. Then the proxy takes over and gets configured according to the control plane definitions.

One of the great things about Istio is that it is a super interesting and informative way to better understand the Kubernetes, Docker, Helm stack.

When I first started learning Kubernetes it wasn't clear to me how a small startup or company could leverage the power of Kubernetes because in reality you need some scale to make it worthwhile.

However, once you can play with, observe and better understand some application infrastructure which sits on top of Kubernetes like Istio the light goes on in your head and things get much more interesting.

Here is a really nice short simple introduction to Istio

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-zVlo1F3mUbExQ96fABWcQ

And here are the playlists...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-zVlo1F3mUbExQ96fABWcQ/pla...