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.