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It started with an idea; an idea to demystify a complex piece of software like Istio to as many DevOps and SREs as possible. And it has reached its culmination.
IMESH announces the release of its latest Istio Academy course, “Istio Service Mesh: Hands-on Fundamentals for DevOps and SRE,” on Udemy.
The course includes 3 hours and 30 minutes of on-demand video that delves into the fundamentals of Istio, with hands-on demos. It will help DevOps and SRE professionals to build a firm foundation in Istio concepts, and set you up to cover the steep learning curve of Istio confidently.
This is the first of the many courses around Istio we have in the pipeline. Hope you enjoy it. (Check out the course here.)
Why should DevOps and SREs learn Istio fundamentals?
As part of our job helping enterprises of various sizes implement and maintain Istio, we regularly have conversations with the likes of cloud architects, lead DevOps, and SRE managers. Three common trends emerge out of those conversations.
1. IT teams face microservices and cloud challenges
Adopting microservices architecture and deploying applications in the cloud has brought a new set of challenges for architects, DevOps, and SREs. With applications distributed across multiple cloud data centers, it is hard to manage their network and security, while having observability into the overall infrastructure. These additional complexities are severely affecting the time to market, slowing down the software delivery process.
2. Service mesh adoption on the rise
A service mesh software simplifies the network and security of applications by abstracting them from the application layer to the infrastructure layer. Most enterprises that we talk to are evaluating a service mesh, like Istio, or have already implemented it in production — to combat the microservices and cloud challenges.
Statistics of rise in service mesh production usage over the years (Source: CNCF)
3. Lack of Istio experts
Istio is one of the popular open-source service mesh software. Google, Microsoft, and IBM are a few of its top contributors, and the Istio project recently graduated from CNCF. However, most enterprises agree that there is a lack of experts who can implement and maintain Istio for them. It does not matter how humongous the salary package is, there is not enough talent to run a complex mesh.
These trends make it clear: adopting microservices architecture is challenging, and those who have a good grip on Istio will be in high demand in the future.
What to expect from the Istio Academy course?
Ever heard of the phrase, “A sturdy house is built on a solid foundation”? Our goal with the Istio Academy course is to lay a solid foundational knowledge of Istio, its concepts, and use cases.
The Academy course starts with the definition of service mesh, then moves on to Istio, its architecture, components, and use cases. The course ends with an introduction to the latest, sidecar-less Istio ambient mesh. Here is a glimpse of the topics you will learn in the course:
- Introduction to service mesh and Istio
- Istio components and Envoy proxy
- Istio implementation – demo
- Zero trust network (ZTN) and mTLS with Istio – demo
- Istio Gateway – demo
- Load balancing and canary rollouts with Istio – demo
- The architecture of Istio and API gateway
- Network resiliency features of Istio
- Circuit breaking, timeouts and retries, fault injection, traffic mirroring – demo
- Istio observability architecture
- How to get application logs, Envoy logs, and traces
- Jaeger, Prometheus, and Kiali – demo
- Istio integrations
- The latest Istio ambient mesh
There are enough demos for you to try out while learning the concepts. Throughout the course, we have used a sample banking application.
Enroll in the Istio Academy course today
Being thorough with the Istio fundamentals is something we cannot stress enough. Because when you test Istio configuration in a dev cluster, you will see unexpected behaviours that you have to diagnose and troubleshoot. And if you lack proper foundational knowledge about Istio, it will leave you scrambling. We have seen this happening to IT teams, particularly DevOps and SREs in different enterprises.
So what are you waiting for? Enroll in the Istio Academy course and master Istio fundamentals.
