Istio’s Mixer: Policy Enforcement with Custom Adapters - Limin Wang, Google & Torin Sandall, Styra
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 15/12/2017

Istio’s Mixer: Policy Enforcement with Custom Adapters [I] - Limin Wang, Google & Torin Sandall, Styra

The Istio service mesh provides a highly extensible platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Istio’s highly extensible nature is one of the main selling points as it allows you to enforce your own organization-specific policies across large fleets of microservices. At the same time, new technology always has a learning curve, and with all this extensibility and generality the task can be quite daunting.

In this talk, Limin Wang (Software Engineer at Google) and Torin Sandall (Technical Lead of the Open Policy Agent project) explain how Istio’s Mixer works and lead a deep dive into Mixer Adapter development. The talk shows (with demos) how the Mixer Adapter model enables custom policy enforcement and how the model is used to integrate third party policy engines like the Open Policy Agent.

This talk is targeted at platform engineers interested in using the Istio service mesh to enforce custom policies in their microservices. The talk also provides new ideas about the kinds of policies that can be enforced in Istio today.

About Torin Sandall
Torin Sandall is the technical lead of the recent open source Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. He has spent 10 years as a software engineer working on large-scale distributed systems projects. Prior to working on the Open Policy Agent project, Torin was a senior software engineer at Cyan Inc. (acquired by Ciena Corp.) where he designed and developed core components of their SDN/NFV platform such as modelling languages as well services for resource orchestration and topology discovery. Torin has recently given talks on policy-related topics in Kubernetes at ContainerDaysPDX and LinuxCon Beijing as well as the Kubernetes Community Meeting and the Kubernetes SF meetup.

About Limin Wang
Limin Wang is a security technical lead for Istio and Cloud Endpoints projects at Google. Before joining Google, she was a senior software engineer at VMware. Limin holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University.
Join us for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona May 20 - 23, Shanghai June 24 - 26, and San Diego November 18 - 21!  Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.