Running an API Gateway on Istio - Pitfalls and Learnings - Karim Lakhani, Intuit
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2023-11-15

Running an API Gateway on Istio - Pitfalls and Learnings - Karim Lakhani, Intuit

This session explores the lessons learned in running one of the largest workloads by scale at Intuit, Intuit’s API Gateway on Istio Service Mesh. Intuit API Gateway is the front door to Intuit’s APIs and serves billions of requests every day and has thousands of pods running at peak with about 40 namespaces across 13 Kubernetes clusters for multi-tenancy service 1.1 million RPS. Given the scale of this application there were hurdles encountered in running this on Istio including non-centralized IP filtering rules, cross-AZ data transfer incurring costs, auto-scaling challenges with Istio sidecar, partitioning concerns, and many more. While it was essential to scale and run this application flawlessly keeping the cost under check was also a challenge. This session helps gain insights into the solutions that were adopted including canary deployment strategy, getting the bin packing right for maximized performance and improved costs and implementing region failovers using Argo workflows.