Using Istio to Manage the Cross-Regional & Cross-Cluster Microservices - Xi Ning Wang, Alibaba & Xiaozhong Liu, UniCareer

UniCareer is an E-Learning career development platform that targets various needs for global students and working professionals, and serving the users from several regions of the world. These applicat …

UniCareer is an E-Learning career development platform that targets various needs for global students and working professionals, and serving the users from several regions of the world. These applications are deployed at the multiple Kubernetes clusters running at Alibaba cloud’s several regions to reduce the latency. In order to manage efficiently these micro-services, one multicluster service mesh is required to control the traffic, secure the service-to-service communication, etc. Istio, a service mesh built on Kubernertes, can support many possible topologies for distributing the services of an application beyond a single cluster. Throughout this case study, we’ll share the design and techniques on multicluster deployments using Istio service mesh, and discuss some challenges and corresponding practices based on the requirements and the limitations of the underlying platform.