The Istio Proxy is a microservice proxy that can be used on the client and server side, and forms a microservice mesh. The Proxy supports a large number of features.

Client Side Features:

• Discovery & Load Balancing. The Proxy can use several standard service discovery and load balancing APIs to efficiently distribute traffic to services.

• Credential Injection. The Proxy can inject client identity, either through connection tunneling or protocol-specific mechanisms such as JWT tokens for HTTP requests.

• Connection Management. The Proxy manages connections to services, handling health checking, retry, failover, and flow control.

• Monitoring & Logging. The Proxy can report client-side metrics and logs to the Mixer.

Server Side Features:

• Rate Limiting & Flow Control. The Proxy can prevent overload of backend systems and provide client-aware rate limiting.

• Protocol Translation. The Proxy is a gRPC gateway, providing translation between JSON-REST and gRPC.

• Authentication & Authorization. The Proxy supports multiple authentication mechanisms, and can use the client identities to perform authorization checks through the Mixer.

• Monitoring & Logging. The Proxy can report server-side metrics and logs to the Mixer.

To learn more...

• User guide coming soon!
• Contributing to the project

If you have a question about an Istio proxy or have a problem using one, please file an issue.