Liveblog: Kicking Off Day 1 at SoloCon ’22

Solo.io’s second annual user conference is about to start, and it looks like it’ll be an exciting day!

Get ready for the kickoff of SoloCon. The event starts at 8:00am PST / 11:00am EST and will continue to stream overnight for attendees joining from EMEA and APAC.  There are lots of sessions scheduled for the day spread across three tracks: Community & Open Source, Service Mesh & Application Networking, and Edge & API Gateway.

Be sure to register and create a custom agenda. Some sessions you should check out include:

• Opening Keynote and Welcome: Join Idit Levine (Solo.io CEO and founder), Solomon Hykes (Docker founder, Dagger.io founder), Louis Ryan (Istio co-creator), and Christian Posta (Solo.io Global Field CTO) for some exciting news, stories, updates, and a warm welcome.
• How Constant Contact is Leveraging Gloo and Istio to Transform our Platform: Interested in modernizing your microservice architecture? Join senior principal software engineer Dave Ortiz as he walks you through Constant Contact’s journey as they designed their microservices, exposed APIs, and integrated new and old services together.
• Building a Modern Application Infrastructure at USAA: USAA provides financial services for millions of military members and their families. Join Jesus Mireles to hear how they are developing and running modern applications to delight their customers and deliver outstanding services. In this talk, Jesus will discuss some of the challenges and requirements for USAA’s API Management Platform. You will hear a summary of the journey and see a high-level overview of the solution.
• From the Cloud to the Kernel: Powering Observability with eBPF: Have you tried to create and run your own eBPF programs? There are several valid approaches for getting started with eBPF, but they can be intimidating to a newcomer. Most of these mechanisms have advanced toolchains to configure, require writing boilerplate code, require jumping between programming languages, in addition to other challenges. In this session, we will present our new open-source project BumbleBee, which intends to enable you to quickly and easily create, run, and share your eBPF programs with a low barrier of entry. Additionally, with a live demo, we will explore what is happening behind the scenes to give you a high-level understanding of eBPF and how to use BumbleBee to get started with writing and sharing your own programs.
• Introducing GraphQL for Gloo Edge and Gloo Mesh: GraphQL is a powerful new query language for APIs that is transforming how modern applications are developed and architected. A key benefit of GraphQL is the ability for clients to leverage a single API endpoint to access data in any shape they need, unlocking massive performance and efficiency gains for front-end applications. While most of the excitement with GraphQL focuses on the front end, the benefits to a well-architected back end GraphQL infrastructure are just as important. In this talk, Sai and Keith will introduce the new GraphQL support coming to Gloo Edge and Gloo Mesh. The talk will highlight the benefits that native Envoy GraphQL support and a declarative approach to GraphQL provides to developers and platform engineering teams, along with a feature overview and roadmap.

In addition to those listed above, there are nine more full sessions including Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge product roadmaps, and five lightning talks set for the day on the Americas schedule. We expect some lively debates about overcoming your observability woes as you scale your architecture, working with service mesh in production for performance and reliability, improving application security at the edge, IPv6, Log4Shell, and more. We’re also expecting to hear some exciting announcements about GraphQL, eBPF, and Gloo Mesh.

Stay tuned for more updates later today

We’ll post another liveblog recap at the end of the Americas schedule later today highlighting key moments and sharing advice on where to go to catch the fun stuff this year at SoloCon 2022.