Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium vs Istio

Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium is a paid, hardened distribution of Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon, built and supported by Cilium’s creators. Cilium supplies network-layer connectivity and security across multi-cloud and on-premises environments. Enterprise policies include DNS-aware, Layer 7, and deny rules for fine-grained traffic control and micro-segmentation. Hubble provides real-time network-flow visibility, policy visualization, and an interface for troubleshooting and network management. Tetragon adds runtime enforcement and security observability, including protocol enforcement, IP and port whitelisting, and automatic application-aware policy generation. Cluster Mesh connects clusters across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and on-premises environments. The product also offers sidecar-free service communication and advanced load balancing. It runs on Linux in self-hosted environments, with hybrid deployment and a distributed control plane. Deployment guidance covers Azure Marketplace, an Azure Resource Manager template, and Azure CLI. Pricing is on request. Hubble UI, DNS Proxy HA, and Tetragon are not enabled by default for AKS creation or upgrades.

Istio is a free, open-source service mesh that adds security, connectivity, and monitoring for distributed applications with few or no service-code changes. It manages HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic, with automatic load balancing, routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection. Deployment options include sidecar mode and ambient mode, which uses a per-node Layer 4 proxy and can optionally add a per-namespace Envoy proxy for Layer 7 features. The control plane runs on Kubernetes, while the mesh can extend to other clusters, virtual machines, and endpoints outside Kubernetes. Security capabilities include workload identity, mutual TLS, authentication, authorization policies, and audit tools. Istio can generate traffic metrics, logs, and traces, including for ingress and egress. It can be installed with istioctl or Helm, and its integrations documentation covers tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Kiali, and cert-manager. Istio 1.31 supports Kubernetes versions 1.32 through 1.36. Supported releases receive critical-issue patches and technical assistance from the community; development builds have no support.