Future of Istio - Sidecar, Sidecarless or Both?

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

2023-04-20

Authors: Neeraj Poddar

Summary

The main theme of the conference presentation is the roadmap for Istio in 2023, which focuses on making the service mesh more predictable, stable, and valuable for users. The presentation also discusses the transition from sidecar proxies to the ambient architecture and the future of Istio.

The themes for Istio in 2023 are accelerating the time to value for the service mesh, making the transition to mtls easier, reducing the total cost of ownership, and continuing to be predictable and stable.
The focus areas for Istio in 2023 include getting the ambient mesh to production, participating in the Gateway API and Gamma API initiatives, promoting alpha and beta features and APIs, and integrating natively with other Cloud native projects.
The presentation explains the shift from sidecar proxies to the ambient architecture and how it makes Istio more flexible and scalable.
The future of Istio may involve a combination of sidecar proxies and the ambient architecture, depending on the use case and requirements.

The speaker mentions that Istio used to be unpredictable and exciting in its early days, but the goal now is to make it boring and predictable for easier management and maintenance. The speaker also jokes about using chat GPT to create a poem on service mesh, which turned out surprisingly well.

Abstract

Join the maintainers of Istio to learn about the current ongoing efforts and future roadmap of Istio as we continue to make Istio more performant and secure by providing new deployment options with the Ambient architecture.

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