Battle of the circuit breakers: Istio vs Hystrix

Kubernetes in general, and Istio in particular, have changed a lot the way we look at Ops-related constraints: monitoring, load-balancing, health checks, etc. Before those products became available, there were already available solutions to handle those constraints.

Among them is Hystrix, a Java library provided by Netflix.
From the site: “Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.”
In particular, Hystrix provides an implementation of the Circuit Breaker pattern, which prevents a network or service failure from cascading to other services. But now Istio also provides the same capability.

In this talk, we will have a look at how Istio and Hystrix implement the Circuit Breaker pattern, and what pros/cons each of them has.

After this talk, you’ll be able to decide which one is the best fit in your context.