Heard of service mesh, sidecars, Istio and Envoy? Ever wondered about their role in the world of microservices and how they work together under the hood? If so, this is the talk you'll never want to miss out.

In this talk, through the lens of a Java developer, we'll explore the inner workings of xDS, the de facto standard protocol that powers service mesh architecture. In addition to learning about the xDS protocol itself, we'll explore how xDS operates in different architectural settings, both sidecar-based and sidecar-less.

This talk will also introduce Armeria, a Java microservice framework, as a way to leverage the full potential of xDS, by showing how you can configure your microservice clients dynamically at runtime, such as reconfiguring retry policies and circuit breakers, for wide range of protocols; HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC, Thrift and more.

This talk is designed for Java developers of all experience levels, although an understanding of RPC and load balancers would be useful.