Overview
Solo.io is excited to be participating at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023. At this year’s event, we are thrilled to be a Gold sponsor!
Be sure to stop by and see us during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon from November 7-9 in Chicago, IL to learn from and connect with the team here at Solo.io. Drop by our Booth #D11 to chat with us, get a demo, and pick up some swag!
Solo.io is proud to be participating in several co-located events throughout the week:
- We are delighted to be a Diamond sponsor of CiliumCon on November 6.
- We are also hosting the Cloud Native Gangsters Speakeasy with Snyk & Teleport on November 6th. Check below for more information!
We can’t wait to see you there!

Meet with us a Kubecon+CloudNativeCon NA
The Solo.io team of experts and engineers will be available for a demo and to discuss how the Gloo portfolio can enable your application networking use cases for Kubernetes, API Gateway and Service Mesh.
Schedule
November 6
9:50 AM CST
Kubernetes on Edge Day
Pi in the Sky: Onboarding Edge Workloads Into the Service Mesh!
Speakers | Marino Wijay & Nina Polshakova, Solo.io
A range of industries including industrial automation, smart appliances, robotics, and agricultural systems require edge computing. What if there was a way to abstract networking policies, security, and observability from the application running on the edge? Enter Istio. Istio supports connecting workloads outside of a K8s to the mesh providing the benefits of a service mesh to workloads running anywhere- from legacy applications running on ec2 instance to a tiny Raspberry Pi. Connecting workloads with the new Istio Ambient model simplifies the process of adding edge devices into the mesh- without any messy sidecar. We’ll use a Raspberry Pi and onboard it into the Mesh, proving out edge computing use cases. In this talk, we illustrate seemingly endless possibilities with how Ambient Mesh can support Edge Compute environments without any changes to the underlying applications and provides unified L3/L4 Network policies, security, and observability.
November 6
10:20AM CST
Ciliumcon
Keynote- Advancing Cilium within the Kubernetes Ecosystem
Speakers | Idit Levine, CEO
November 6
11:05 AM
Ciliumcon
What's Smoother Than Your Morning Espresso Pull? Bridging Gaps with BGP and Cilium!
Speakers | Marino Wijay, Platform Advocate
The widely adopted, highly capable Border Gateway Protocol has won the hearts and minds of the Internet. And, it’s made its way into Kubernetes! However, not every workload is a container, and not every VM can make its way into Kubernetes so, how do we ensure every workload can freely talk? If BGP on Cilium is the answer how should we proceed? – Why should we care about BGP? – How do we work with Cilium’s BGP Control Plane? – How can we get our VMs to communicate with our pods using BGP? – Can we see a working BGP setup? – Does “show ip bgp summary” still work? This presentation allows us to delve into BGP internals and history while providing a demonstration of BGP in action, running in Cilium. We’ll become the best neighbors with an upstream router, and we’ll share ALL THE NETWORKS!
November 6
11:40 AM
Wasm Day
Extending Sidecarless Applications with Wasm in Istio Ambient Mesh
Speakers | Lin Sun, Solo.io
Istio Ambient entered its alpha phase as part of Istio 1.18, and the dedicated Istio community is actively working towards driving Ambient to beta. The introduction of Ambient aims to simplify workload operations and reduce infrastructure costs. In this presentation, Lin, a founding member of Istio, will demonstrate how to seamlessly extend your cloud-native applications with Wasm without the need for sidecars or application restarts, utilizing Istio Ambient. Through live demonstrations, she will showcase the usage of Istio Ambient and Istio’s WasmPlugin resource, enabling dynamic extension of cloud-native applications without interrupting application requests. Lin will explain the entire process, from configuring Wasm for the workload to setting up the corresponding Envoy configuration for the workload’s waypoint proxy. Witness the power of Wasm as it extends cloud-native applications running in Kubernetes, free from sidecars, with an engaging live demo.
November 6
2:40 PM
Ciliumcon
Come BGP with Me
Speakers | Daneyon Hansen, Solo.io & Yutaro Hayakawa, Isovalent
When Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) was first introduced in Cilium v1.10, MetalLB was used as the control plane with minimal support for the protocol. This gave users a simple and effective way to route ingress traffic to services and pods. As time passed, the requirements for BGP grew and Cilium answered the call with a wide range of new features. The BGP feature set has undergone considerable change in recent releases by deprecating MetalLB in favor of a native BGP control plane. In this session, attendees will learn about Cilium’s BGP features and how they work harmoniously to provide a powerful ingress solution.
November 6
3:50 PM CST
Istio Day
Panel: Ask Me Anything About Istio Service Mesh
Speakers | Lin Sun & Neeraj Poddar, SOlo.io; John Howard, Google, Mitch Connors, Aviatrix & Eric Van Norman, IBM
November 6
4:45 PM CST
Istio Day
Workshop: Getting Started with Ambient Mesh: An Interactive Tutorial
Speakers | Christian Posta & Jim Barton, Solo.io
November 6
5:50 PM
Envoy Con
Lightning Talk: Leveraging Envoy's New Filter Chain Matchers for Advanced TLS Routing
Speakers | Ashish Banerjee, Software Developer, Solo.io
Enterprises often have legacy clients or applications using old (often deprecated) TLS ciphers which are not natively supported by modern proxies like Envoy. While these ciphers are usually disabled for good security reasons, in reality, customers migrating to Envoy have to maintain compatibility with these existing clients until they can be upgraded. In this session, we will cover how the filter chain matcher APIs can be used for these advanced TLS routing use cases.We will demonstrate how we wrote an extension to the “filter_chain_matcher” API which examines the client-provided TLS ciphers. The extension selects an appropriate filter chain, performing either native TLS termination in Envoy, or an L4 proxy to a separate upstream for TLS termination and subsequent handling. Thanks to the flexibility of the matching API, we are able to do this on a per-virtual host basis and ensure compatibility with existing protocols such as SNI.
November 7
4:30pm - 6:00pm
Kubecon + CloudNative Con
Demystifying Cilium: Learn How to Build an EBPF CNI Plugin from Scratch
Speakers | Adam Sayah, Field Engineer
eBPF technology is driving a transformative shift in the network stack, enabling secure code execution within a protected kernel sandbox. This facilitates instant metrics retrieval and the implementation of network routing and security policies. Additionally, eBPF empowers us to reshape traffic at a low level with XDP, which delivers high-performance programmable packet processing seamlessly integrated with the kernel. This revolutionary impact extends to the Kubernetes networking landscape, as eBPF serves as the core technology behind projects like Cilium and its CNI plugin that provides high-performance network capabilities, but such powerful technologies remain enigmatic for many. The objective of this workshop is to dive into the inner workings of these technologies, participants will learn the basics of eBPF and CNI, and they will gain hands-on experience in creating a CNI plugin for Kubernetes utilizing eBPF, demystifying the underlying mechanics of eBPF-based projects.
November 8
11:00am - 12:30pm
Kubecon + CloudNative Con
Istio: Hands-on Development and Contribution Workshop
Speakers | Lin Sun, Dir, of Open-Source, & Steven Landow
Wished you knew how to contribute code for Istio, the most popular service mesh and a CNCF graduated project? Where to get started with contributing to Istio? How to get involved with the community? Join us to learn an overview of architecture on how Istio works, how to set up a development environment, how to contribute, develop and test Istio useful in day to day use. Unblock yourself and others! It’s easier than you think! We will go through useful resources and ways to interact with the project and community, to explore the benefits of Istio and get you started on your first contribution effectively!
November 8
5:25pm - 6:00pm
Kubecon + CloudNative Con
Istio: The Past, Present and Future of the Project and Community
Speakers | Louis Ryan, CTO Solo.io & John Howard, Google
Istio, a CNCF recent graduated project, is the most popular service mesh, simplifying observability, traffic management, and policy for your services. The project, its roadmap, and the community have gone through several changes over the past few months and we’d like to give some updates. We will discuss the project and its health, new features added in recent releases, progress on the new ambient sidecar-less data plane mode, Gateway API support, the project roadmap, and much more. We will also discuss the plans for the future of community-building efforts and how you can help us make Istio the best that it can be.
November 9
2:00pm - 2:35pm
W175
Kubecon + CloudNativeCon
Service Mesh Battle Scars: Technology, Timing, and Tradeoffs
Speakers | Keith Mattix, Microsoft; John Howard, Google; Lin Sun, solo.io; Thomas Graf, Isovalent; Flynn, Buoyant
It has been ~6 years since the first service meshes hit the market, and hundreds if not thousands of users are employing the technology in production today. As the space has matured and meshes are used at scale, many users are wondering about why certain constraints exist in their mesh of choice. Come hear maintainers of 3 CNCF service mesh projects discuss the very real tradeoffs they’re making everyday with topics ranging from eBPF, sidecarless, Rust proxies, multicluster, and user experience.
Solo.io Featured Speakers
We are thrilled that so many Soloists will be speaking this year in Chicago! Be sure to check out their sessions or stop by our Booth to connect with them.

Lin Sun
Director of Open-Source

Idit Levine
Founder and CEO

Adam Sayah
Field Engineer

Marino Wijay
Developer Advocate

Christian Posta
VP, Global Field CTO

Jim Barton
Field Engineer

Nina Polshakova
Software Engineer

Neeraj Poddar
VP, Engineering

Daneyon Hansen
Software Engineer

Louis Ryan
Chief Technology Officer
Just for Fun

November 6 | 7pm-11pm
CloudNative Gangsters Speakeasy
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Mae District, 19 E 21st St. Chicago IL
We Are Hiring!
We believe that great architecture is the key to successful software development. And we make this possible by building great teams. If you are passionate about cloud native technologies like containers, Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy Proxy, GraphQL, eBPF, serverless functions, and more, then Solo.io is the place for you!
Solo is growing rapidly and we’re hiring for a number of positions. Be sure to check out the Careers page on our website, or chat with us in person!