Tell about your experience with Istio and canary deployments.

In working with Istio, I configured a service mesh to manage microservices, utilizing routing, security, and monitoring capabilities. For canary deployments, I used Istio VirtualService and DestinationRule to gradually direct part of the traffic to the new version of the service, monitoring metrics and logs to assess stability.

Example configuration of a canary deployment with Istio:

apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  hosts:
  - my-service
  http:
  - route:
    - destination:
        host: my-service
        subset: v1
      weight: 90
    - destination:
        host: my-service
        subset: v2
      weight: 10

Thus, 10% of the traffic is directed to the new version, allowing issues to be identified before a full release.