Comparison Among Basic and Community Editions

Specification

Management scale

Maximum number of pods a 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

Supports version-based service management and monitoring.

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Supports version-based service workload management.

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Multiple service ports

Supports multi-port, multi-protocol service management.

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Supports multi-port grayscale release.

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Multiple service types

Supports 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

Supports 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

Supports 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

Supports injection of faults with a specified delay or error and configuration of fault percentage.

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Outlier detection

Supports 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

Supports governance of internal communication between services and external access to services (ingress traffic).

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Running environments

Supports containerized application management.

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Authentication

Supports non-intrusive two-way TLS authentication and channel encryption.

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Authorization

Supports service access authorization management.

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Grayscale release

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

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Supports canary release template.

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Supports blue-green deployment template.

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Supports monitoring of service status during grayscale release to facilitate decision making.

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Supports monitoring of service requests during grayscale release to facilitate decision making.

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Supports dynamic configuration of the number of service pods during grayscale release.

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Supports dynamic traffic ratio monitoring during grayscale release.

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Application topology

Provides global topology of traces in applications.

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Provides key metrics such as the number of total requests and abnormal requests in topology.

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Supports real-time application topology.

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Tracing

Supports non-intrusive tracing point setting.

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Monitoring metrics

Supports monitoring of the running data of service pod CPUs, memory, and disks, monitoring of access metrics such as RPS and latency, analyzing statistics 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

Supports non-intrusive collection of access logs.

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Installation

Supports enabling Istio for existing and newly created Kubernetes clusters in a few clicks.

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Upgrade

Supports smooth upgrade of the control plane without interrupting application services.

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Supports smooth upgrade of the data plane without interrupting application services.

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Add-on management

Supports installation of community add-ons, such as Grafana and Prometheus in a few clicks.

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Supports installation of Tracing in a few clicks.

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Supports installation of Kiali in a few clicks.

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Supports installation of ELK in a few clicks.

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Agent management

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

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Proxy mode

Supports a sidecar in each pod.

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Command line tool

Supports traffic policy management using command line tools, such as istioctl and kubectl.

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