Istio-operator feature comparison
The Calisti team actively maintains its fully upstream-compatible Istio distribution and several open-source projects and integrations that serve as the basis for Cisco Service Mesh Manager. From the perspective of Istio management, the Calisti team maintains the following:
- The Istio operator is an open source project, which is the core component involved in Istio control plane and gateway lifecycle management for Cisco Service Mesh Manager.
- Cisco Service Mesh Manager is a commercial product that includes all the features mentioned in this guide, enterprise support, and optionally integration support for customer environments.
| Istio operator | Cisco Service Mesh Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Install Istio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Manage Istio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Upgrade Istio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Uninstall Istio | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multiple gateways support | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi cluster support | needs some manual steps | fully automatic |
| Prometheus | ✓ | |
| Grafana | ✓ | |
| Jaeger | ✓ | |
| Cert manager | ✓ | |
| Dashboard | ✓ | |
| CLI | ✓ | |
| OIDC authentication | ✓ | |
| VM integration | ✓ | |
| Topology graph | ✓ | |
| Outlier detection | ✓ | |
| Service Level Objectives | ✓ | |
| Live access logs | ✓ | |
| mTLS management | ✓ | |
| Gateway management | ✓ | |
| Istio traffic management | ✓ | |
| Validations | ✓ | |
| Support | Community | Enterprise |