Roche, one of the largest global healthcare companies, has embarked on the challenging journey of building a modern, cloud native edge compute platform that helps to run applications on customer premises, like laboratories or hospitals.

In this talk, we will discuss the challenges of highly protected environments and show how leveraging Cilium Service Mesh can bring “the firewall” closer to the workloads. This not only allows for more fine-grained traffic control, but also simplifies the operations and configuration of network policies using a GitOps approach, alongside the deployment of workloads.

Going beyond this, we’ll also look at some of the more advanced features of Cilium - like sending cluster traffic that targets the cloud via a specific forward proxy before it leaves the customer premises.