Running Istio in Production as a Small Team of Newbies - John Keates, Wehkamp

Running Istio in Production as a Small Team of Newbies - John Keates, Wehkamp

While we were planning to transplant services from Mesos and a homegrown traffic management setup over to Kubernetes, we found out we couldn't easily replicate the features we relied on in the old system without also getting an entire service mesh, proxy extension method and self-service traffic configuration method in place. A number of 'getting started' constructions rely on different things like the nginx ingress controller or a single type of traffic piping into a single application that happens to have a handful of services hosting a couple of paths. We embarked on a journey to get Istio working for us, making a bunch of mistakes and learning from them, to end up with a very performant and configurable system enabling a brownfield migration without having to rewrite over 300 microservices. In this presentation, John will take you along on this journey and go beyond the examples that would fit inside documentation and take into consideration the limits and requirements of older systems to make selection of traffic management methods a little easier. In an end-to-end showcase you will find out how even with very small teams and little knowledge you can leverage Istio to make your life, and the life of developers that rely on your platform easier.