Given the increased use of service mesh to deploy collections of containerized microservices, we can expect to see tools emerge that automate and simplify the administrative tasks associated with this architectural style. Kiali is one such tool. Kiali provides a graphical user interface to observe and control networks of services deployed with Istio. We've found Kiali useful for visualizing the topology of services in a network and understanding the traffic routed between them. For example, when used in conjunction with Flagger, Kiali can display requests that have been routed to a canary service release. We particularly like Kiali's ability to artificially inject network faults into a service mesh to test resilience in the face of network interruptions. This practice is all too often ignored due to the complexity of configuring and running failure tests in a complex mesh of microservices.
