Catch all 7 Solo.io sessions at IstioCon

Solo.io | March 01, 2021

This year’s first ever Istio conference, was a resounding success, bringing together ~3,000 attendees and community members each day from across the globe.

Istio has quickly become the leading service mesh for managing service-to-service communication of cloud-native services and this show demonstrated the resounding breadth and depth of development, adoption and interest across the Istio customer and partner ecosystem.

As Louis Ryan, Principal Engineer at Google and Istio leader, joked to attendees in the opening keynote, his goal is “to make Istio as boring as possible.”

The Solo.io team was excited to participate in this groundbreaking event as part of the Program Committee as well as having a stellar team of speakers led by Christian Posta, Idit Levine and Lin Sun. The team dove into a series of packed keynotes, workshops and sessions looking at everything from multi-cluster management to security and troubleshooting with Solo.io Gloo Mesh for Istio.

If you missed any of the IstioCon sessions, you can watch recordings of the live presentations. Just go to the IstioCon site, select LIVE, then select SCHEDULE (below the IstoCon 2021 logo) in the upper left portion of the screen. Just choose the session you would like to watch from the pop-up box.

Solo.io had many sessions including:

Opening Keynote: Lin Sun, Director of Open Source, Solo.io

In this keynote, Lin gave an Istio project update on what the Istio community has accomplished last year and a live demo about using Istio to instantly gain observability and security among each of the microservices.

I want to Sketch a Mesh for You; Christian Posta, Global Field CTO, Solo.io

In this slide-free session, Christian dove into how best to get started with Istio and iteratively adopt it into production. He covered concepts like sidecar injection, the power of gateways, best practices for tying in PKI, and DNS proxying as new workloads are added to a service mesh.

Developing & Debugging WebAssembly Filters; Idit Levine, Founder and CEO & Yuval Kohavi, Chief Architect, Solo.io

WebAssembly filters provide users with the ability to extend and customize Istio. But what tools and methods are available in the market today to support these filters? In this session, Idit and Scott explored some of the existing tools and solutions that work with WebAssembly and provided real-world insight into the development processes being used by early adopters. Yuval also demo-ed live how organizations can write, test, debug and ship WebAssembly filters to extend and customize Istio.

Istio Multi-cluster Workshop; Denis Jannot, Director of Field Engineering & Christian Posta; Global Field CTO, Solo.io

In this hands-on workshop based on Istio and Gloo Mesh (https://github.com/solo-io/gloo-mesh), participants were given a dedicated VM and walked through the following labs;

Deploying 3 Kubernetes clusters using Kind
Learning how to set up a management plane with Gloo Mesh
Federating the identity of the Istio clusters
Configuring cross cluster communications
Experimenting with Wasm
The labs are publicly available for participants

Deep Dive into Istio Auth Policies; Lawrence Gadban, Field Engineer, Solo.io

One of the primary benefits of using Istio is that it provides a comprehensive security model. This enables users to express complex authentication and authorization policies for the services running within their mesh. While these security features are commonly used, they can cause confusion and are frequently misunderstood. Lawrence explored the security mechanisms available in Istio and dove into how these policies can be translated from high-level user-facing configurations to runtime policies in various Envoy proxies. Specifically, he reviewed the following:

Mutual TLS and how to configure peer authentication through Peer Authentication and DestinationRule resources
Enforcing end-user authentication via JWTs with Request Authentication resources
Enforcing authorization rules through Authorization Policy resources

Istio Debugging: Finding and Fixing Issues in a Multi-cluster Service Graph; Scott Weiss & Eitan Yarmush, Solo.io

Istio has some basic tooling to facilitate request troubleshooting, but it has something much more powerful at its core: Envoy proxy. When requests in the mesh start failing, Envoy is the definitive source for debugging information as it has a wealth of telemetry and logging that can be enabled to pinpoint problems along the request path. In this talk, we looked at how to build a repeatable and automatable set of tools to quickly debug a request path across multiple hops and potentially across multiple clusters and Istio control planes. Leveraging Envoy capabilities like access logging, module debug logging, the tap filter, configuration dumps, and detailed telemetry across multiple hops in the data path combined with some best practices, you will no longer have to worry when things appear to “not be working”.

Closing remarks; Lin Sun, Solo.io

Lin wrapped up the conference and talked about the overall growth of Istio in the market, the excitement from the attendees to IstioCon, and thanked all the contributors to IstioCon and the Istio community.

There’s More

Congratulations to Rick, Milind, Govindaraj, Vrushali and Sagar, for winning our raffle and a brand-new pair of Apple Airpods. For those of you who were not able to get an early edition of Christian Posta upcoming book, Istio in Action at the show, sign up for SoloCon and get another chance to win.

SoloCon and Free Workshop

Looking to find out more about Istio and Service Mesh, join us for SoloCon 2021, March 23-25. SoloCon is a must-attend event that will feature industry speakers, informative sessions and hands-on workshops. Attendees will also have the opportunity to engage with experts, learn from their peers and network with other attendees. Register today at www.solo.io/solocon/.