Basic Edition vs Community Edition

Category	Function	Item	Community Edition	Basic Edition
Specification	Management scale	Maximum number of pods a service mesh can manage	-	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.	√	√
	Multiple service versions	Version-based service management and monitoring	-	√
	Multiple service versions	Version-based service workload management	√	√
	Multiple service ports	Multi-port, multi-protocol service management	√	√
	Multiple service ports	Multi-port grayscale release	-	√
	Multiple service types	Containerized service backend	√	√
	Protocols and languages	HTTP and gRPC grayscale release, governance, and monitoring (varying with protocols), language- and framework-agnostic, and non-intrusive	√	√
	Application gateway	Layer-4 and Layer-7 external access, entry path mapping, TLS termination at gateways, and configuration of external certificates and secrets	√	√
	Load balancing	Round robin, random, minimum number of connections, and consistent hashing algorithms based on a specific HTTP header or cookie value	√	√
	Fault injection	Injection of faults with a specified delay or error and configuration of fault percentage	√	√
	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	√	√
	Traffic types	Governance of internal communication between services and external access to services (ingress)	√	√
	Environments	Containerized application management	√	√
	Authentication	Non-intrusive two-way TLS authentication and channel encryption	√	√
	Authorization	Service access authorization management	√	√
	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	√	√
		Canary release template	-	√
		Blue-green deployment template	-	√
		Service monitoring during grayscale release for decision making	-	√
		Service request monitoring during grayscale release for decision making	-	√
		Dynamic configuration of the number of pods during grayscale release	-	√
		Dynamic traffic ratio monitoring during grayscale release	-	√
	Application topology	Global topology of traces in applications	-	√
		Key metrics such as the number of total requests and abnormal requests in a topology	-	√
		Real-time application topology	-	√
	Tracing	Non-intrusive tracing point setting	√	√
	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	√	√
	Access logs	Non-intrusive collection of access logs	√	√
	Installation	Enabling Istio for existing and new Kubernetes clusters with just a few clicks	-	√
	Upgrade	Smooth upgrade of the control plane without interrupting application services	√	√
	Upgrade	Smooth upgrade of the data plane without interrupting application services	√	√
	Add-on management	Installation of community add-ons, such as Grafana and Prometheus, with just a few clicks	-	√
		Installation of Tracing with just a few clicks	-	√
		Installation of Kiali with just a few clicks	-	√
		Installation of ELK with just a few clicks	-	√
	Proxy management	Transparent and iptables-based traffic interception, as well as automatic proxy injection at namespace and workload levels	√	√
	Proxy mode	One sidecar per pod	√	√
	Command line tool	Traffic policy management using command line tools such as istioctl and kubectl	-	√