Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices

This is not an example of "WHEN Not to do Microservices". It is a perfect demonstration of "HOW not to do Microservices".

The design of the Istio control plane is a dog's breakfast. And because they've screwed up royally with it, they're now loudly proclaiming that it's the fault of microservices and a sudden lurch to a monolith is now the way to go.

This is the kind of thing you can do with a version 0.x. You could get away with doing it with an "Istio 2", but a massive breaking change to an architecture is not OK to do on a version 1.5.

The Istio website gave no warning of this, there's no obvious roadmap published. I'm beginning to think the Istio team are a bunch of amateurs who like fiddling with new toys but don't really care that their software is being used in production environments.

Is Istio safe to use on production systems? As of this announcement, no.