IstioCon 2021: Retrospective

Introduction

Last week, the Istio community held its 2021 IstioCon, which I found to be really enjoyable and worthwhile. It helped me learn more about the people that develop and use Istio, gave me insight into what the development goals and motivations for the project are, and encouraged me to dive deeper into what Istio is capable of.

Like most conferences recently, IstioCon was completely remote, which was very convenient for jumping in and out of. IstioCon spanned five days and consisted of a single track, which was a nice change as compared to other conferences. With the single track, I never experienced the fear of missing out, and felt I could attend talks that I might not otherwise attend if it were a larger conference. Even with a single track, there was still so much content that I have much to look forward to watching online at a later date.

I also had the opportunity to ask questions of the speakers who faced some of the same Istio challenges that I had encountered. Because the conference was so intimate, every speaker generously answered all of my questions, either during the talk Q&A or via the IstioCon Slack channel. This looked to be the case for other attendees that I observed as well.

While there were many great talks and many that I did not see, I want to mention a few that I found particularly helpful.

  • Istio Project Roadmap (by Neeraj Poddar & Louis Ryan) - This was a particularly useful talk because it really gave a sense of where the project had been and where it is headed. A big theme of the talk was their focus on making Istio operationally boring; DevOps engineers should be able to install, maintain, and upgrade Istio without incident. Another focus for the talk was how Istio recently gained the ability to run compiled WebAssembly code, allowing more extensibility to Istio without necessarily building features in. Overall, this talk was great to see how the Istio developers were taking user feedback into account.
  • Extending Envoy with WASM from start to finish (by Ed Snible) - This talk demonstrated how easy it is to write custom WebAssembly extensions in Istio. The talk covered how WebAssembly is Istio’s replacement for Lua-based Envoy filters, and offers a much more robust extension point. It also covered a lot of “gotchas” that the speaker encountered during his time creating custom WASM filters. This talk was particularly useful to me because I had spent so much time writing Lua-based filters; this gave me some ideas as to how I might improve those filters.
  • Better External Authorization (by Yangmin Zhu) - Istio 1.9 introduced a new feature that allows you more control over how you can leverage Istio Ingress Gateway for Authentication. Now, you have more flexibility in what authentication mechanism you use using Istio’s RequestAuthentication feature. This is definitely worth watching if you are integrating authentication into Istio.
  • Deep Dive into Istio Auth Policies (by Lawrence Gadban) - This was a really great talk that really digs deep into how Istio Auth works from an EnvoyFilter level. This helped answer a lot of questions I had about the technical details of traffic routing and authentication in Istio. Definitely worth a watch.

These are only a few of the many great talks. I’m not certain where the videos will be posted, but they are still available to view here if you sign-up for the event. Thank you to all of the speakers and to the Istio community for organizing such an event. I look forward to attending next year!

Written on March 1, 2021