[tyingq]

Interesting, but there's currently a lot of overlap between competing things that want to inject themselves between service consumers and service producers.

There's API gateway products (Apigee, Kong, etc). Load balancers and proxies of various types. Caching and CDN products. More niche stuff like bot blocking, and this attempt to bundle control and statistics.

It would be nice if some sort of standard pattern emerged, where something was the main orchestrator. At the moment, you can end up with suboptimal stuff. Like a CDN that routes to a cloud API gateway that then routes to a (not geographically close) load balancer, that then hits the actual service.

I'm surprised that Cloudflare, Akamai, and the like haven't offered all of these things at the edge. Some things are service to service, but a fair amount is client to service...putting this stuff closer would help.

[rdli]

Istio is focused on service-to-service traffic (i.e., in your data center). It uses Lyft Envoy's L7 proxy to add security, resilience, and observability to your L7 traffic.

Imagine you've got 50 microservices and you're using RPC to communicate. You're going to want global rate limiting and circuit breaking behavior to insure resilience, particularly as your topology gets deeper.

There is a use case for extending Istio to the Edge, which is why we wrote Ambassador (it's an API Gateway built on Envoy), and we just released an Istio integration (http://www.getambassador.io/user-guide/with-istio.html).

Full disclosure: Work on Ambassador

[fierro]

Regarding API gateway products, Apigee will actually work with Istio

https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital-business/simplifying-m...

[tyingq]

That's an example of the breakage though. Apigee's cloud runs in only 2 specific AWS regions. So once you tie all these pieces together, you end up with a long path, with some functionality that should be closer to the end user.

[gregbrail]

Apigee's cloud runs in a lot more than two AWS regions today, not to mention GCP regions, and the whole product can be installed in your own datacenter. We also offer a "micro gateway" that lets the proxy component run anywhere and communicate with the rest of Apigee via an API. We'll be taking this hybrid mode further and the Istio integration is one of the things that will take advantage of that hybrid model.

(I work for the Apigee part of Google.)

[tyingq]

Sorry, yes. I should have said only two of the four US regions.

[AmIFirstToThink]

>the whole product can be installed in your own datacenter

Could you please provide a link to documentation/articles that showcase this use case... on-premise installation of Apigee?

[akhimich]

Here is what i found http://docs.apigee.com/private-cloud/latest/overview

(I work at Apigee)

[goodroot]

Disclaimer: I work with Fly.

We're building something a lot like that! https://fly.io

Currently, we support AWS Lambda, Heroku, and self-hosted backends. Bringing things to the edge can give some major benefits; a smart proxy, too, can give developers a lot of power with minimal effort.