Well ... I hope they uninstall it! Istio was everywhere at KubeCon 2018 and our group, enticed by the benefits of a service mesh added Istio to our clusters over the following few months. It added a lot of complexity but came with a huge cost in performance and the ability to understand and troubleshoot the system
At KubeCon 2019, Linkerd was everywhere (with their 2.0 announcement) and the Air Force presentation described in this article was the only Istio topic I found (and I was specifically looking for Istio information). It turns out that the Envoy proxy is not nearly so lightweight and unobstrusive as described.
So now we're most of the way through migrating from Istio to Linkerd and, while there are some issues we're still working through related to tracing (Jaeger, etc), if you don't specifically try to use the proxy, you have a regular Kubernetes cluster. The proxy can be install per pod or per namespace making it easy to get it out of the way.
Great to hear Linkerd is treating you well. If you run into any issues please join us in the community Slack (slack.linkerd.io). Big friendly group of people ready to help you :)
At KubeCon 2019, Linkerd was everywhere (with their 2.0 announcement) and the Air Force presentation described in this article was the only Istio topic I found (and I was specifically looking for Istio information). It turns out that the Envoy proxy is not nearly so lightweight and unobstrusive as described.
So now we're most of the way through migrating from Istio to Linkerd and, while there are some issues we're still working through related to tracing (Jaeger, etc), if you don't specifically try to use the proxy, you have a regular Kubernetes cluster. The proxy can be install per pod or per namespace making it easy to get it out of the way.