Istio Operation Gotchas

In this post I discuss a few aspects when putting istio in operation. Installation Istio installation can be confusing, due to architectural and guideline changes as well as renaming of operator CRDs since its release, and especially since 2020. This left lots of information outdated on the web, adding to Istio’s perceived complexity. Currently, the … Read moreIstio Operation Gotchas

Service Proxy – from Nginx to Envoy

Update (Nov 20, 2022): 1. Envoy’s configuration schema can be hard to get used to. It is lacking examples because the documentation is mostly generated. Use its examples directory to find real-life configuration examples. 2. the configuration file at the bottom this blog post has been updated. See the current revision here. Envoy proxy is … Read moreService Proxy – from Nginx to Envoy

Istio External Authorization via OIDC

Istio service mesh allows application developers to offload non-core features to infrastructure layer. We explored authentication and authorization with Istio in a basic lab. In this post we continue to explore its capabilities with OIDC integration. This capability is made available thanks to the CUSTOM action in authorization policy, supported since the release of 1.9. … Read moreIstio External Authorization via OIDC

Istio Lab – Authentication and Authorization

My previous blog discussed as service mesh what Istio can offer in terms of authentication and authorization capabilities. Istio can authenticate an incoming HTTP request, ensuring the JWT issued has not been tampered somewhere in the middle. The fields in the JWT allows for more flexibilities at the point of authorization. This combination allows Istio … Read moreIstio Lab – Authentication and Authorization

Istio Authentication and Authorization

Applications running on Kubernetes platform seeks to offload common non-business features to the platform. Istio helps Kubernetes bridge that gap. It can enforce mTLS communication, which is known as Peer Authentication. It can help with two other things with the use of JWT token: when a web request presents a JWT token, it can validate … Read moreIstio Authentication and Authorization

Traffic Segmentation on Kubernetes Platform

When operating Kubernetes as a platform for multiple tenants, one of the concerns is controlling the network traffic. This is sometimes referred to as traffic segmentation. This initiative involves a broad range of technical topics from networking to containerization. By no means I am an expert on each of those topics. I have however developed … Read moreTraffic Segmentation on Kubernetes Platform