Katherine and Adam on comparing Istio, Spring and MicroProfile frameworks

31-07-2018 Antonio Goncalves 0 all

Hi Katherine, Hi Adam, tell us who you are and what lead you into microservices?

We are both software engineers at IBM, currently working with Apache Kafka in IBM Messaging. We first worked together on WebSphere Liberty where we helped our customers to build microservice applications. The text-based microservice adventure Game On and two IBM redbooks about microservices are just some of the materials we created to help developers understand and experiment with microservices.

What will you be talking about at Voxxed Days Microservices?

We will be introducing the Istio platform, including why it was created and how it does or doesn’t fit in with existing framework-level solutions for microservice availability, security and scaling. There are plenty of materials available that show how to get started with Istio but not many that cover how to integrate it with your existing applications.

When looking at Istio we think “good, all the technical plumbing is solved, we don’t need to add technical frameworks to our business code anymore”? What do you think? Is Istio the answer to all our problems?

We have yet to see a technology choice that is “the answer to all our problems” and although Istio does solve a lot of problems it isn’t a silver bullet. Without giving away too much of our talk, it all comes down to context and who knows best given the situation. Often Istio can make a choice on behalf of the application, but sometimes the application knows best.