StackPointCloud is now offering managed Istio support within the Stackpoint.io platform, making it easier for DevOps teams to deploy, monitor and maintain microservice-based applications. Configuring Istio within Stackpoint.io takes only a few minutes. Once up-and-running, users can monitor dependencies between microservices, application performance issues and microservice policies from the Stackpoint.io control panel.

The Stackpoint.io managed Istio offering is available now and can be purchased as a subscription add-on to the Stackpoint.io platform. StackPointCloud is demonstrating its managed Istio solution this week at the Open Source Summit in Los Angeles.

Stackpoint.io allows DevOps teams to deploy and manage Kubernetes-based applications, workloads and serverless infrastructure across all the leading cloud infrastructure platforms. The Stackpoint.io platform enables drop-in logging and monitoring with Elasticsearch Fluentd Kibana (EFK), Prometheus, Sysdig and more; tools for enforcing network policy (Calico) and container runtime security (Twistlock); Kubernetes upgrades in a single click; the ability to scale and manage nodes automatically, manually or in pools; and redundancy. To date, more than six thousand Kubernetes clusters have been built using Stackpoint.io.

Istio addresses many of the challenges faced by developers and operators as monolithic applications transition towards a distributed microservice architecture. The term “service mesh” is often used to describe the network of microservices that make up such applications and the interactions between them. As a service mesh grows in size and complexity, it can become harder to understand and manage. Its requirements can include discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics and monitoring, and often more complex operational requirements such as A/B testing, canary releases, rate limiting, access control and end-to-end authentication. Istio provides a complete solution to satisfy the diverse requirements of microservice applications by providing behavioral insights and operational control over the service mesh as a whole.

With its support for Istio, Stackpoint.io users can now:

More easily observe  dependencies between microservices and traffic flow
Identify issues within their apps, saving the business time and keeping users happy
Introduce policy enforcement to ensure services are doing what they’re supposed to
Maintain encryption using mTLS
Combine Istio with other cloud-native tools such as  Prometheus, Calico and EFK;
Secure any of their microservices, including that “super custom” widget app
Combine Istio with other pre-configured solutions from the Stackpoint.io Marketplace , including GitLab EE, Fabric8 and Kubeless

“We don’t look at Kubernetes as the end of the stack, but the platform on which a company’s entire cloud-native environment can live,” says Matt Baldwin, founder and CEO at StackPointCloud. “To do this, users will need a service mesh. Our belief is that Istio will become the de facto service mesh, and our intention is to continue to enrich support for it within Stackpoint.io.”