In today’s microservices-driven world, managing traffic smartly is just as crucial as deploying the services themselves. As your system grows, so do the risks — like overuse, misuse, and cascading failures. And if you’re running multi-tenant services, it’s essential to enforce request limits for each customer. That’s where rate limiting in a service mesh like Istio can make a big difference. In this post, we’ll explore why rate limiting is important in Istio and show you how to set it up effectively.

Why Rate Limiting Matters in Istio

Why Was It Important for Us?

This is in continuation of the incident that we faced, which is detailed in How I Made My Liberty Microservices Load-Resilient. One of the findings during the incident was the missing rate limiting in the Istio ingress private gateway. Here are the challenges that we faced: