Kubernetes out of the box is a strong platform for running and coordinating large collections of services, containers, and applications. As is, Kubernetes is powerful for many solutions. Remember Underdog? He was a mild-mannered dog, but when stress and conflict were introduced to the plot he took a magic pill, he became a superhero. Istio is a superhero for Kubernetes.

Istio is an open, platform-independent service mesh that manages communications between services in a transparent way. With a distributed architecture many things can fail, slow down and become less secure. Istio provides solutions to those stresses in our plot toward this architecture style:

- Traffic management
- Observability
- Policy enforcement
- Service identity and security

We will explore these benefits with Istio through some working examples on Kubernetes. The key point is this meshing solution allows your code to be less coupled to the inherent weaknesses of a distributed platform.