Before we go ahead and install the Istio service mesh and explore its capabilities, we will install a demo application known as BookInfo, which was created by Istio (https://istio.io). This demo application will help us find out about Istio's capabilities, such as traffic management, security, policies, and observability, which we'll be looking at in more detail in the upcoming chapters. This chapter will show you the basic functionality of a demo application and how it behaves without using any Istio capabilities. 

In a nutshell, we will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Overview of Istio's BookInfo application
• Deploying the BookInfo application in Kubernetes
• Enabling a DNS search for Kubernetes services in a VM
• Understanding the BookInfo application