Kubernetes in general and Istio in particular have greatly changed the way we look at ops-related constraints: monitoring, load balancing, health checks, etc. Before these products came on the market, there were already solutions to counteract these limitations.

This includes Hystrix, a Java library from Netflix. It states, “Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate access points to remote systems, services and third-party libraries, stop cascading failures, and provide resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable. In particular, Hystrix provides an implementation of the Circuit Breaker Pattern that prevents a network or service failure from cascading to other services. But now Istio also offers the same functionality.

In this talk we will take a look at how Istio and Hystrix implement the Circuit Breaker pattern and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

After this presentation you can decide which is the best solution for your application.