Hi @BoHenriksen and @rvandegrift,
I work on Istio at Google Cloud, and I’d like to encourage you to give Anthos Service Mesh another look.
- Lots of manual work required on top of managing the mesh - including upgrades. (improvements to this were released yesterday, but I haven’t dug in)
Please do! It’s going to look very familiar to you if you’ve been following the canary control plane deployment model and revision/tag-based upgrades
- Lots of untrustworthy setup steps: “curl | kubectl” isn’t cool.
The setup is currently done with a script that you’re encouraged to read and understand before blindly running!
You’ll be pleased to know we’re currently testing a new and improved installation experience, which we hope to release very soon.
- Substantially more complex than istio itself, both from the operations and purchasing points of view.
ASM manages the control plane and certificate authority for you, so it’s substantially simpler than Istio.
Purchasing is also trivial: enable the API! You don’t need to be an Anthos subscriber (not obvious from the name, that’s true.) It’s even free until October 2021.
- After being burned by Istio on GKE, it’s hard to trust another Google-managed version of this again.
Mea culpa. We have been focused on improving the Istio open-source installation experience, and working on our managed product. “Istio on GKE” sat in the middle of those two options, tied to GKE releases, and so we are now working to move people to whichever option suits them best. If that’s open source Istio, as called out on the rest of the thread, that’s great. We’d love it if you’d given ASM a look.
Please ping me if you have any questions!