Istio Demystified

Why do we need yet another proxy server when we got Nginx, Apache, Node, Tomcat and others?

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1. Dynamic Configuration — The ability to use APIs for dynamic configuration changes is highly sought after due to the large-scale deployment of cloud-based applications.

Apache and Tomcat provide very limited ability to change the configurations once the application has been deployed. Though Nginx does provide the ability to dynamically change configurations, the configuration files of Nginx are itself clumsy and not well structured. (Nginx was built at a time, when webservers had just one purpose — to serve static content fast, and Nginx did that really well). Due to the advent of cloud technologies and growth of internet in general, we have the problem of organizing the configuration files of proxy servers in a better way.