Google, IBM, Lyft collaborate on open source project Istio

Google, IBM, and Lyft have announced the launch of  Istio, a new open platform that allows developers a vendor-neutral way to connect, secure, manage and monitor networks of different micro services on cloud platforms.

"Istio is the result of a joint collaboration between IBM, Google and Lyft as a means to support traffic flow management, access policy enforcement and the telemetry data aggregation between microservices. It does all this without requiring developers to make changes to application code by building on earlier work from IBM, Google and Lyft," said Jason McGee, VP and CTO, IBM Cloud Platform in a blog post.

While the Istio platform is a collaborative open source project between Google and IBM, the underpinning software was built using the Envoy proxy from Lyft, which the ride-share company developed to address its internal operability challenges.

“As monolithic applications are decomposed into microservices, software teams have to worry about the challenges inherent in integrating services in distributed systems: they must account for service discovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, end-to-end monitoring, dynamic routing for feature experimentation, and perhaps most important of all, compliance and security,” the Istio team explains.

“Inconsistent attempts at solving these challenges, cobbled together from libraries, scripts and Stack Overflow snippets leads to solutions that vary wildly across languages and runtimes, have poor observability characteristics and can often end up compromising security," it added.

For IBM, the Istio project supports the company's efforts to simplify the way developers build and manage more secure, cognitive apps with containers on IBM Cloud. The effort has grown more timely as microservices and containers take center stage in next-gen app development. IBM says Istio also gives CIOs a powerful tool to enforce security, policy, and compliance requirements across the enterprise.

Istio currently runs on Kubernetes platforms, such as the IBM Bluemix Container Service. Its design, however, is not platform specific. The Istio open source project plan includes support for additional platforms, including CloudFoundry, VMs.

Several companies have already expressed support and are making early commitments to work with Istio including Red Hat, Pivotal, Weaveworks and Tigera, McGee added.