Platform Engineering is the new black and we posit that service mesh is the perfect complement and an indispensable sharp tool in every SRE’ tool belt. Albeit been around for a few years, service meshes are now blossoming into a de-facto standard for providing much needed features to cloud native platforms, such as zero trust security enforcement, observability, traffic shaping and control over the application networking layer(s). This demo-heavy presentation will walk you thru the rationale behind adopting a service mesh and what can it do in practice to alleviate the pain of running at-scale platforms to deliver cloud native self-service infrastructure to developers. We will focus on Istio (the most popular service mesh) but the learnings extends to any other service mesh implementation; we will provide a workshop-style repository to follow offline.

Learn why and how every SRE should know what service mesh and what can it do for them: control and management of application networking, automated zero trust security and near-perfect observability of cloud native applications

The talk has a flow and structure to help lead the conversation from principles (SRE and Platform engineering) towards the practical implementation details with tools like ArgoCD and Istio.

1. Intro on why platform engineering is trending now
2. SRE principles, system engineering for platforms
3. Pains of platform engineering (security, multi-tenancy, observability)
4. Solution based on (among others) service mesh, GitOos and Zero trust security achieved thru those tools
5. Demo with multi-tenant, multi-cluster architecture and self-service platform for developers