Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

etcd VS Istio

Compare etcd VS Istio and see what are their differences

etcd logo etcd

A distributed, reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

Istio logo Istio

Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices
  • etcd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-29
  • Istio Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-01

etcd features and specs

  • Consistency
    etcd uses the Raft consensus algorithm to ensure strong consistency across distributed systems, making it ideal for scenarios where reliable data storage is critical.
  • High Availability
    By distributing data across multiple nodes, etcd ensures high availability and fault tolerance, allowing services to remain operational even if some nodes fail.
  • Simplicity
    etcd offers a simple key-value store interface, making it easy to understand and integrate with other services without requiring complex configurations.
  • Performance
    Optimized for fast reads and writes, etcd can handle large volumes of concurrent requests, making it suitable for high-performance applications.
  • Secure
    etcd provides excellent security features, including SSL/TLS encryption for data in transit and role-based access control to ensure that data access is tightly controlled.

Possible disadvantages of etcd

  • Resource Intensive
    Running etcd, especially in a clustered configuration, can be resource-intensive, requiring significant CPU and memory to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
  • Operational Complexity
    Although etcd itself is simple, managing a distributed etcd cluster can become complex, requiring expertise to configure and maintain properly.
  • Data Volume Limitations
    etcd is not designed as a general-purpose database and has limitations on how much data it can efficiently store, typically up to a few gigabytes per cluster.
  • Write Throughput
    The write throughput of etcd can be a bottleneck under heavy load, as it needs to ensure data consistency across nodes, which can introduce latency.
  • Limited Query Capabilities
    As a key-value store, etcd lacks the advanced querying capabilities of traditional databases, which may limit its use for complex data retrieval operations.

Istio features and specs

  • Traffic Management
    Istio provides powerful traffic management capabilities, including fine-grained control over the flow of traffic and API calls between services.
  • Observability
    Istio enhances observability with metrics, logs, and tracing, making it easier to monitor microservices and gain insights into performance and behavior.
  • Security
    Istio improves security by providing service-to-service and end-user authentication, as well as powerful policy enforcement for access control.
  • Policy Enforcement
    Istio allows for the enforcement of organizational policy and access control, making it easier to ensure compliance and governance.
  • Service Resilience
    Capabilities such as circuit breakers, retries, and timeouts make applications more resilient to failures and ensure greater availability.
  • Platform Agnostic
    Istio is designed to be platform agnostic and can be deployed on any Kubernetes platform, making it highly flexible.

Possible disadvantages of Istio

  • Complexity
    Istio adds a significant amount of complexity to a system, which can make it harder to manage, especially for teams without experience in service meshes.
  • Resource Consumption
    Istio can be resource-intensive, requiring additional CPU, memory, and storage, which can lead to higher operational costs.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a steep learning curve associated with Istio, making it challenging for new users to get up to speed quickly.
  • Operational Overhead
    Managing and operating Istio might require dedicated personnel and can introduce operational overhead, including the need for monitoring and updating the control plane and sidecar proxies.
  • Latency
    The addition of sidecar proxies and other Istio components can introduce some latency in the network traffic between services.

etcd videos

ETCD in Kubernetes

More videos:

  • Review - Service Discovery Zookeeper vs etcd vs consul أكتشاف الخدمات شرح عربى
  • Review - Episode#11 Working with ETCD - Backup and Restore Operations - Part#1

Istio videos

Istio Service Mesh Explained

More videos:

  • Review - What is Istio?
  • Review - Module 1: Istio - Kubernetes - Getting Started - Installation and Sample Application Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to etcd and Istio)
Web Servers
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
20 20%
80% 80
Web And Application Servers
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Istio should be more popular than etcd. It has been mentiond 51 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

etcd mentions (32)

  • Unlock your Kubernetes to run custom resource based microservices in any scale
    Unfortunately there is a big problem with custom controllers, they can't handle huge amount of data for several reasons. Kubernetes relies on ETCD for all data storage, which limits scalability, flexibility, and performance for complex or high-volume workloads. What kind of problems I'm talking about? - Source: dev.to / 26 days ago
  • AWS Config vs Kubernetes Native Policy Engines: Who Governs What?
    In Amazon EKS, AWS Config helps you track key components such as: EKS control plane logging, VPC settings and network exposure, encryption status for logs and secrets and IAM roles used by worker node groups. It can detect misconfigurations like: 🚫 Publicly accessible EKS clusters ⚠️ Disabled encryption for secrets stored in Kubernetes ETCD ⚠️ Ensures EKS clusters are running on currently supported versions,. - Source: dev.to / 27 days ago
  • The Double-Edged Sword of Microservices: Balancing Abstraction and Complexity
    Using a service discovery mechanism: A service discovery mechanism, such as etcd or ZooKeeper, can help to manage the complexity of microservices by providing a centralized registry of available services and their instances. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Designing a fault-tolerant etcd cluster
    Etcd is an open-source leader-based distributed key-value datastore designed by a vibrant team of engineers at CoreOS in 2013 and donated to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2018. Since then, etcd has grown to be adopted as a datastore in major projects like Kubernetes, CoreDNS, OpenStack, and other relevant tools. Etcd is built to be simple, secure, reliable, and fast (benchmarked 10,000 writes/sec),... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Kubernetes Cluster Architecture
    Etcd is a key value store for all cluster data. It is an etcd data store. So, It is highly available, reliable, and distributed. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
View more

Istio mentions (51)

  • Evaluating 2 Popular Service Meshes
    The decision to add a Service Mesh to an application comes down to how your application communicates between itself. If for instance your design is heavily asynchronous and relies on events and messages, then a service mesh isn't going to make a lot of sense. If however, you've built an application that is heavily reliant on APIs between itself, then a service mesh is a great piece of technology that can make this... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Kubernetes Multi-Cloud Multi-Cluster Strategy Overview
    IstioIstio is one of the leading Kubernetes service mesh solutions. You can use Istio to set up multi-cluster networking, allowing workloads in one cluster to interact with those in other clusters. This gives you more flexibility in where and how you deploy your apps. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Using Istio Resources with nxs-universal-chart
    Istio is an open-source project that handles routing problems arising in microservices-based applications. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • 26 Top Kubernetes Tools
    Istio is a service mesh that enables simpler networking, traffic management, service discovery, and monitoring for your Kubernetes clusters. It coordinates communications between your app's microservices, providing much more control than the plain Kubernetes Service model. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • eBPF, sidecars, and the future of the service mesh
    Bart: You raise a crucial point about the human aspect. While we address technical challenges, the time spent resolving errors detracts from other tasks. The community has developed products and projects to tackle these concerns and costs. One such example is Istio with Ambient Mesh. Another approach is sidecarless service meshes like Cilium Cluster Mesh. Can you explain what Ambient Mesh is and how it enhances... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing etcd and Istio, you can also consider the following products

Apache ZooKeeper - Apache ZooKeeper is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source server which enables highly reliable distributed coordination.

linkerd - Linkerd is an ultralight service mesh for Kubernetes. It gives you observability, reliability, and security without requiring any code changes.

Eureka - Eureka is a contact center and enterprise performance through speech analytics that immediately reveals insights from automated analysis of communications including calls, chat, email, texts, social media, surveys and more.

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Apache Thrift - An interface definition language and communication protocol for creating cross-language services.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.