Untangling Your Service Mesh with Feature Gates - Niranjan Shankar, Microsoft
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 22/11/2023

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Untangling Your Service Mesh with Feature Gates - Niranjan Shankar, Microsoft

Disillusioned with the complexity of service mesh? Don’t worry - you aren’t alone. While their extensive set of features and configurations makes service meshes adaptable to various cloud environments, they can also be overwhelming to operators primarily interested in their core use-cases. Unrestricted access to all these capabilities (particularly experimental or alpha status ones) can also be ill-suited for production environments. Switching meshes or going sidecar-less could work, but aren’t always feasible options. In this session, you’ll learn some useful techniques - such as using Kubernetes admission controllers, feature flags, API abstractions, and GitOps tools - for feature-gating your service mesh and narrowing the configuration surface area. You’ll also walk away with some guidelines for deciding which networking, security, and observability capabilities to include in, or exclude from, your mesh environments, based on examples from Istio and Open Service Mesh. Demo: https://github.com/nshankar13/tutorials/tree/main/istio-feature-gating-demo