This course is a practical introduction to Istio, designed for anyone who wishes to build on their knowledge of Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes to learn how to install and configure a service mesh and to understand the benefits of deploying and running distributed applications in a service mesh environment. LFS144x is intended for application developers, systems operators, and security professionals who already have familiarity and experience with Kubernetes and who wish to take their first steps towards learning and understanding Istio.

This course begins with an overview of service meshes in general and Istio in particular. We describe what problems service meshes solve, and explain Istio's architecture, how Istio functions, and how the environment around a deployed application is configured to allow the application to join the mesh. Through the course's lessons and labs, you will experience and learn how Istio facilitates system observability by collecting and publishing metrics and allows you to control how traffic is routed to your application. Learn how Istio supports canary deployments and other scenarios and makes your distributed applications more resilient through retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers. The final chapter covers more advanced topics, including onboarding workloads running on VMs (outside of Kubernetes) and how Istio provides for extensibility through WebAssembly plugins.

This course will prepare you for working with Istio as a developer whose applications are deployed to an Istio service mesh or as a service mesh operator with responsibilities for installing, upgrading, and configuring Istio as a security professional responsible for defining ingress, egress, authentication and authorization policies with Istio. You will develop an understanding of the concepts and, through the labs, have the chance to practice common scenarios, including installing Istio, deploying applications to the mesh, monitoring applications, configuring traffic management, including ingress, and applying security policies.