Service Mesh at Scale: How Xbox Cloud Gaming Secures 22k Pods with Linkerd

The presentation discusses the benefits of using Linkerd in Xbox Cloud Gaming's Kubernetes clusters, including zero config MTLS and code-free visibility. The speaker also shares their plans for future improvements, such as multi-cluster communication and fault injection testing.

• Linkerd has been a valuable tool for securing over 50 microservices and 22,000 pods in Xbox Cloud Gaming's Kubernetes clusters
• Zero config MTLS and code-free visibility have saved the company thousands of dollars per month
• Canary deployments have been integrated into Azure DevOps release pipelines to enable auto rollbacks
• Future plans include implementing service-to-service off, multi-cluster communication, and fault injection testing

The speaker shares their initial nervousness about setting up Linkerd, but found it surprisingly easy to use and effective. They also mention using Linkerd's metrics to drive canary deployments, which has been successful in improving reliability.

During this session, Chris Voss, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, will share how Microsoft deployed Linkerd to apply mutual TLS, observability, and reliability to 22,000 meshed pods across 26 clusters. Xbox Cloud Gaming is Microsoft's game streaming service. With over 300 games available in 26 countries. The app is massive: 26 clusters across 18 regions, each with 50+ microservices and 700 to 1,000 pods — all of which are meshed with Linkerd. Chris will cover Xbox Cloud Gaming's Kubernetes and Linkerd journey, including how they: * Applied mutual TLS to 22k pods with zero config * Reduced pod/container monitoring cost by thousands of dollars using Linkerd observability * Integrated Prometheus, Linkerd, Flagger and Azure ADO for progressive delivery.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!