Basic Edition vs Community Edition

Specification

Management scale

Maximum number of pods a service mesh can manage

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200

Basic functions

Service discovery and registration

The service center cluster obtains the service list, automatically registers containerized services, and refreshes service pod statuses. You do not need to implement the registration and subscription logic as services can be automatically discovered, and dynamically managed.

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Multiple service versions

Version-based service management and monitoring

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Version-based service workload management

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Multiple service ports

Multi-port, multi-protocol service management

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Multi-port grayscale release

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Multiple service types

Containerized service backend

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Protocols and languages

HTTP and gRPC grayscale release, governance, and monitoring (varying with protocols), language- and framework-agnostic, and non-intrusive

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Application gateway

Layer-4 and Layer-7 external access, entry path mapping, TLS termination at gateways, and configuration of external certificates and secrets

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Load balancing

Round robin, random, minimum number of connections, and consistent hashing algorithms based on a specific HTTP header or cookie value

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Fault injection

Injection of faults with a specified delay or error and configuration of fault percentage

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Outlier detection

Layer-7 request management, including the maximum number of requests, maximum number of requests per connection, maximum number of queued requests, and maximum number of retries; Layer-4 connection management, including the maximum number of connections and connection timeout interval; exception check, and automatic isolation and recovery of faulty pods

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Traffic types

Governance of internal communication between services and external access to services (ingress)

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Environments

Containerized application management

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Authentication

Non-intrusive two-way TLS authentication and channel encryption

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Authorization

Service access authorization management

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Grayscale release

Grayscale traffic distribution policies based on the browser, operating system, custom HTTP header, cookie content, and URL; grayscale release based on request parameters and traffic ratio

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Canary release template

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Blue-green deployment template

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Service monitoring during grayscale release for decision making

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Service request monitoring during grayscale release for decision making

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Dynamic configuration of the number of pods during grayscale release

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Dynamic traffic ratio monitoring during grayscale release

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Application topology

Global topology of traces in applications

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Key metrics such as the number of total requests and abnormal requests in a topology

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Real-time application topology

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Tracing

Non-intrusive tracing point setting

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Metrics

Monitoring of resources like pod CPUs, memory, and disks, monitoring of access metrics such as RPS and latency, statistics analysis of access and abnormal metrics, interconnection with open source metric components such as Prometheus, and interconnection with different metric backends

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Access logs

Non-intrusive collection of access logs

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Installation

Enabling Istio for existing and new Kubernetes clusters with just a few clicks

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Upgrade

Smooth upgrade of the control plane without interrupting application services

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Smooth upgrade of the data plane without interrupting application services

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Add-on management

Installation of community add-ons, such as Grafana and Prometheus, with just a few clicks

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Installation of Tracing with just a few clicks

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Installation of Kiali with just a few clicks

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Installation of ELK with just a few clicks

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Proxy management

Transparent and iptables-based traffic interception, as well as automatic proxy injection at namespace and workload levels

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Proxy mode

One sidecar per pod

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Command line tool

Traffic policy management using command line tools such as istioctl and kubectl

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