Red Light, Green Light: Traffic Security in the Service Mesh wi... Alexa Nicole Griffith & Zhenni Fu
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 20/04/2023

Red Light, Green Light: Traffic Security in the Service Mesh with Istio - Alexa Nicole Griffith & Zhenni Fu, Bloomberg

At many companies, it is vital that the traffic flowing in and out of an application is handled securely at the edge of a service mesh. Istio’s ingress and egress gateways allow you to apply routing rules and authorization policies to access internal and external services in a controlled way. It is a common security requirement to only expose particular services or restrict services to a set of approved outbound hosts, requiring a strict Level 7 policy to lock down the traffic. Managing such a service mesh infrastructure is challenging and requires additional solutions to secure the network. In this talk, we will describe how Bloomberg, a financial information company with large amounts of highly-privileged data, uses Istio’s ingress and egress gateways – integrated with SPIFFE/SPIRE – to secure a wide range of services, from highly-critical applications to ML workloads like Jupyter notebooks and inference services in a heterogeneous environment. Fun drawings will be included.