New (free) course introduces learners to the popular open source service mesh platform, Istio

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and the home of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has announced the immediate availability of a new training course on the edX platform: Introduction to Istio (LFS144x).

Last month CNCF announced that Istio, one of the most popular open source service meshes currently in use, has joined the foundation under their project umbrella. This new relationship is an indication that service meshes are becoming a vital component of today's technology infrastructure. As such, the ability to monitor, connect, and secure microservices is quickly becoming an indispensable skill sought by employers.

Introduction to Istio is intended for application developers, systems operators, and security professionals who already have familiarity and experience with Kubernetes, and who wish to take their first steps toward learning and understanding Istio.

"Digital transformation is forcing all organizations to be open source forward. I am thrilled that Tetrate,started by Istio co-founders, have built the first official Istio course to help organizations realize the service mesh's full potential on top of open source Istio." 
                    -       Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The course curriculum features video content, hands-on labs & assignments, and discussion forums to support learning. It begins with an overview of service meshes in general, and Istio in particular. The course then goes on to describe what problems service meshes solve, and explains Istio's architecture, how Istio functions, and how the environment around a deployed application is configured to allow the application to join the mesh.

Using a series of lessons and labs, students will experience Istio and and learn how to:

• facilitate system observability by collecting and publishing metrics;
• allow users to control how traffic is routed to their application, support canary deployments and other real world scenarios;
• make distributed applications more resilient through retries, timeouts, and circuit breakers;
• increase system security through mutual TLS, and by allowing the application of authentication and authorization policies independently from running applications.

The final chapter covers more advanced topics, including onboarding workloads running on VMs (outside of Kubernetes), and how Istio provides extensibility through WebAssembly plugins.

Introduction to Istio is co-authored by Peter Jausovec & Eitan Suez, Content Engineers at Tetrate. Jausovec and Suez built the course in parallel to Istio becoming a CNCF-adopted project in order to give new users to the application a starting point.

"We at Tetrate are proud to be a part of the Service Mesh community. An integral part of our mission is helping to understand and make sense of this important technology. Peter Jausovec and I are happy to make the course 'Introduction to Istio' available on edX through the Linux Foundation. May this course be of assistance to developers, platform engineers, security professionals and others on their cloud-native journey."
                    -       Eitan Suez, Content Engineer, Tetrate

LFS144x is available for immediate enrollment. Participants may audit the course, which includes free access to all course content for 10 weeks. Those wishing to have longer access to the course and earn a verified certificate of completion may do so through edX for $149.

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

edX is the education movement for restless learners and a leading global online learning platform from 2U, Inc. (Nasdaq: TWOU). Together with the majority of the world's top-ranked universities and industry-leading companies, we bring our community of over 40 million learners world-class education to support them at every stage of their lives and careers, from free courses to full degrees. And we're not stopping there — we're relentlessly pursuing our vision of a world where every learner can access education to unlock their potential, without the barriers of cost or location. Learn more at edX.org.

Media Contact:
Amanda Quraishi
The Linux Foundation
512-577-1800
[email protected]

SOURCE The Linux Foundation