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Istio sounds like the short name of a chronic disease. Like "istiothritis"

My granma has istio, it's very painful :(

Istio means sail (the noun) in greek, and it follows a pattern of naval terms being used for things around kubernetes. (Kubernetes itself meaning helmsmen in greek)

That been said, the name that often reminds me of chronic disease is heptio, one of the companies doing work on k8s. (Which by the way comes from the prefix hept which is supposed to mean seven in greek, as the kubernetes logo has seven sides :p)

What does it do?
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It is the gateway drug to over-engineering and over-architecting your microservice-based application.
One of the more important changes:

> Policy Checks Off By Default. Changed policy checks to be turned off by default to improve performance for most customer scenarios.

Given that the Mixer policy engine is a big selling point of Istio, it is disappointing that it hurts performance so much they decided to disable it by default.

Mixer policy is evolving to MixerV2 in upcoming releases. The mixer functionality will migrate inside the proxy so that policy decisions are taken locally. Until then we decided that it was better to make the customer explicitly enable it.
For those unaware, istio is a service mesh. In short, it "manages" your micro-services. Eg. How they connect together and much much more.

Look at what it does and you will see the overhead of what people don't mention in the first talk :p

In a way, I think Istio is the opposite of a microservice ( didn't look at the code, but I see 840 issues in the github repository)