Solo.io to Present 8 Sessions at ServiceMeshCon and Wasm Day during KubeCon – Starting on May 4th

Solo.io | April 10, 2021

Join the solo team at ServiceMeshCon Europe 2021! This event will be held virtually on Tuesday, May 4, 2021, during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 – Virtual and will feature speakers from a variety of organizations focused on service mesh technologies. Topics will include getting started with and adopting a mesh, lessons learned from production deployments, and technical sessions from service mesh maintainers. If you have not yet registered, you can register below.

Eight ServiceMeshCon sessions you won’t want to miss

The Solo team is excited to participate in ServiceMeshCon Europe and we are honored to be presenting at eight sessions throughout the day, including five workshop sessions, one lighting talk, and moderating and participating in the panel. These sessions include:

Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly: Introduction to Adopting a Service Mesh in Your Organization – Christian Posta, Global Field CTO

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 11:40 – 12:10 CEST

Deciding whether or not to use a service mesh and understanding the value/complexity tradeoff is step one when exploring service-mesh technology. Christian Posta has been helping organizations adopt this technology as a practitioner and architect for the last three (or more) years and shares practical guidance for how to adopt a service mesh for your organization. We explore top use cases like security posture, network debugging, regulatory and compliance, imperfect cloud-apps, and overall modernization efforts with microservices architectures.

Administering Multi-Cluster Service Meshes Securely – Eitan Yarmush, Principal Software Engineer & Eric Murphy, Field Engineer

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 13:15 – 13:45 CEST

The majority of existing multi-cluster service mesh architectures require the distribution of Kubernetes API credentials (kubeconfigs) across clusters, typically by provisioning a service account in the local cluster and copying its access token to a process running in a remote cluster. This architecture requires that credentials for the Kubernetes API be shared with entities outside the cluster, exposing it to attack. Furthermore, scalability limits of the Kubernetes API Server make it less than ideal to serve an unbounded number of potential remote clients managing configuration and sharing access to a cluster. This talk will explore the downside of existing approaches in this model and propose a new approach based on a client-server management architecture inspired by Envoy which does not require sharing sensitive Kubernetes credentials with remote clusters.

Virtual Machines as First-Class Citizens in Service Mesh – Denis Jannot, Director of Field Engineering – EMEA

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 13:50 – 14:20 CEST

The adoption of containerization is accelerating and running modern applications on Kubernetes became the standard. But what about the legacy applications that can’t be deployed on Kubernetes? Service Mesh seems to be the bridge that everyone wanted to unify these worlds. You can now (somewhat) easily add Virtual Machines (and even bare metal servers) into your mesh. In this talk, I’m going to show how to do that on Istio and speak about the different challenges someone needs to keep in mind: 1. How to automate the process (from the creation of Service Accounts on Kubernetes to the deployment of the prerequisites in the VMs). 2. How to add VMs in the mesh in a multi-cluster deployment. 3. How to allow canary deployments between Pods and VMs. I’ll also do a demo where I’ll show how to automate the testing using Kind and Docker containers (yes, testing the VM integration without a VM!)

Multicluster Service Mesh – Adam Sayah, Field Engineer

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 14:25 – 14:55 CEST

This workshop is based on Istio and Gloo Mesh (https://github.com/solo-io/gloo-mesh). It’s a hands-on workshop where each participant has a dedicated VM. In the VM, we will deploy three Kubernetes clusters using Kind. One cluster is a management plane where Gloo Mesh is deployed, while Istio is deployed in the two other clusters. Other lab tasks include federating the identity of the Istio clusters, configuring cross cluster communications, failover, and using Wasm.

Service Mesh Extensibility Explained – Lin Sun, Director of Open Source

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 15:05 – 15:35 CEST

You love service mesh but may have found you need to extend your service mesh, whether you want to enhance the sidecar proxy or the gateways or the mesh control plane or plugin in your certificate authority or external authorization system. We’ll explore various use cases and extension points a service mesh could provide to users, using Istio service mesh as an example. This is an intermediate-level talk for audiences who understand the basics of service mesh and would like to further leverage service mesh to do more.

Lightning Talk: The Hardest Part of Operating a Service Mesh: Envoy Proxy – Christian Posta, Global Field CTO

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 16:15 – 16:25 CEST

Operating a service mesh in production has pragmatic complexities, some contributed by Envoy’s underlying powerful feature set. Requests flow over the data plane proxies which means this is an important piece of technology to understand how to operationalize, debug, tune, and observe. In this talk, we share our experience at Solo.io supporting customers on Envoy-based technology both at the edge and in a mesh and share lessons learned such as:

Understanding which telemetry signals to watch for config sync issues, CPU, and memory pressure
Enabling access logging and enhancing it with dynamic metadata
Debugging connectivity issues with Envoy logs, metrics
Tuning for cloud environments with keep-alive settings

Panel: The State of Service Mesh – William Morgan, Buoyant, Idit Levine, Solo.io, Nic Jackson, Harshicorp, Marco Palladino, Kong Inc, Louis Ryan, Google. Moderated by: Lin Sun, Solo.io.

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 16:15 – 16:55 CEST

Do you need a service mesh? Is service mesh getting easier? What is the current state of the service mesh ecosystem? Join us for a live interactive session where our panel of service mesh experts from various service mesh projects (Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect and Kuma) are eager to discuss the latest technology improvements, best practices for adopting service mesh, challenges that lie ahead for these projects, and what’s next.

Access the complete schedule for ServiceMeshCon Europe here.

Attend the Solo.io session at Cloud Native Wasm Day

We are excited to be presenting at Cloud Native Wasm Day on Tuesday, May 4, during KubeCon + CouldNativeCon Europe. This event is an opportunity to learn more about the intersection of cloud native and WebAssembly. Details on the session are as follows:

Developing & Debugging WebAssembly Filters for Envoy – Shane O’Donnell, Software Engineer & Yuval Kohavi, Chief Architect

Tuesday, May 4, 2021, 16:05 – 16:35 CEST

WebAssembly filters allow users the power to extend and customize Istio to their liking. But how do organizations actually develop them? Tooling exists for traditional software development, but established methods and tooling are difficult to come by in the emerging WebAssembly ecosystem. In this talk we will attempt to answer the following, based on our experience working Istio + WebAssembly in customer environments for over one year: How do we write WebAssembly filters? How do we test WebAssembly filters? How do we debug WebAssembly filters? How do we ship WebAssembly filters? We will explore existing tooling and solutions for working with WebAssembly in the service mesh, and provide insight into the development processes being implemented by early adopters of WebAssembly.

Stop by our Virtual Booth at KubeCon + CouldNativeCon Europe 2021 – Virtual

The Solo team is excited to participate in KubeCon + CouldNativeCon Europe 2021 – Virtual as a silver sponsor. We encourage you to stop by our virtual booth from May 3-7, 2021 to check out a product demo, talk with a Service Mesh expert and enter our raffle for some great swag!

Register for KubeCon today!

To register for ServiceMeshCon and Cloud Native Wasm Day, add these co-located events during your KubeCon + CouldNativeCon Europe 2021 – Virtual registration. Register here.