What is Istio?

Istio is a sidecar container implementation of the features and functions needed when creating and managing microservices. Monitoring, tracing, circuit breakers, routing, load balancing, fault injection, retries, timeouts, mirroring, access control, rate limiting, and more, are all a part of this. While all those features and functions are now available by using a myriad of libraries in your code, what sets Istio apart is that you get these benefits with no changes to your source code.