Istio Talks You Don’t Want to Miss at KubeCon NA 2023

We’re just few days away from the start of the most important conference of the year for so many cloud native practitioners and developers, so we would like to take this opportunity to point our readers to some of the unmissable sessions around Istio happening in Chicago next week (some were also mentioned in a recent blog by Peter Jausovec, we’ll be focusing on Istio specifically here).

Insights from the Istio Technical Oversight Committee (TOC)

I’m looking forward to hear from two of the Technical Oversight Committee members for Istio about the project history (since its inception in 2016, as you can see in this short video) and future direction in the session Istio: The Past, Present and Future of the Project and Community; Istio is constantly evolving and adapting to new emerging trends and requirements, so it will be a great opportunity to hear what’s cooking under the hood of one of the most popular service mesh project under the CNCF.

Contribfests FTW

Contribfests are a fun and interactive way to get to know a project and its maintainers and finally we will see one specifically for Istio in Chicago: Contribfest: Istio: Hands-on Development and Contribution Workshop with a diverse group of project leaders and long time contributors will surely get more people involved in the project thus accelerating its evolution.

Ambient Mesh in the Spotlight

Ambient Mesh just turned one year old and it’s maturing quickly into a very appealing way to deploy Istio; so it’s not a surprise to see a talk like Architecting Ambient Mesh for Scale by John Howard from Google (a driving force behind the project and a tireless contributor and mentor to anyone who wishes to help with the project.

Istio and Security

And as adoption rises (specially with service meshes spanning multiple clusters) , with it the need for stronger security and identity management; enter the world of SPIFFE identities and SPIRE server in the session from Lukonde Mwila & Ovidiu Valeanu from AWS Bridging Trust Between Multi-Cluster Meshes, where we’ll learn how to securely provide strong cryptographic identities and establish trust across cluster boundaries (Lukonde was also on a recent Hoot episode).

Scaling, Observability, and Best Practices

The session Lessons from Scaling AI Powered Translation Services Using Istio presented jointly by Lilt and Intel speakers will shed some light on how Isito can effectively help modernizing microservices applications and facilitate adoption of observability and security best practices like external authorization.

Don’t Miss the Graduation Party!

Lastly, you should not miss the Graduated Project Celebration 🎉 where you can have cupcakes (yes, cupcakes!) to celebrate the recent cohort of graduated projects (and Istio is in great company here, with Cilium, CRI-O and lastly KEDA to have graduated as production-ready projects).

I hope to see you soon at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023! If you will be in Chicago from November 6 to 9, drop by our booth #D11 or request a meeting with our onsite team.