 If you are here for ServiceMeshCon, you are in the right place. And if you're not here for ServiceMeshCon, then stay anyway, because it's going to be amazing. All right. Then welcome to ServiceMeshCon, yeah. Come on in. If you are here for ServiceMeshCon, we are just about to get started. All right. Please allow me to introduce myself. I work for Solo, I work on Open Source as Solo. I've been a long time contributor, one of the founding members of the Istio project. I actually wrote two books about Istio. My most recent book is with Christian Poster, who sits right there, Istio and being explained. I'm also a CNCF ambassador. Nick, do you want to introduce yourself? Yes. I'm Nick Jackson. I'm a developer advocate at HashiCorp. My pen background around ServiceMesh architecture, written a book on that, and also currently working on a book around ServiceMesh for O'Reilly, which is a never-ending story. Awesome. Thank you, Nick. I am just so honored to be here. I remember three years ago, I think it was 2019. How many of you were at the first ServiceMeshCon? It was in San Diego. It was, yeah, beautiful, beautiful city. And I had the great pleasure to welcome everybody who was there to the first-ever ServiceMeshCon. So it's just a great honor to be here and welcome you all to the first-ever ServiceMeshCon in the US after COVID in person. I recall three years ago, right before the ServiceMeshCon, I went to the CNCF landscape, and how many of you know all the projects there? Back then, that was three years ago, I captured from CNCF website, so nobody, right? I think that's completely normal even for me. I actually had to look up some of these projects myself after working in ServiceMesh industry for two, three years back then. So now, just last week, I actually also went to CNCF landscape. How many of you recognize half of the projects? Nobody? Somebody? Yeah. Okay, good job. What's the difference from three years ago? What's the big difference? Can I ask someone in the audience? Yes, you're right. It's still an incubating project now, so that's exciting. What else? Yeah, the other thing I guess caught my eye was the number of projects doubled, right? It's even more projects for everyone to keep track of, to figure out what's going on. So I think the industry is becoming more and more complex, in my opinion, with the number of growing projects. So to me, ServiceMesh has a lot of buzzwords around, right? I think it was link one, start with note-level proxy, and then they changed it. They were like, well, the cycle architecture is the best architecture, and then people start talking about EBPF. It's like the magic silver bullet, and what EBPF can bring to ServiceMesh. Can we get rid of cycle? So this notion of cyclists has been flowing around for the last year also, but then there was a lot of concerns in the industry of going back to note-level proxy. How do we handle isolation, multi-tenancy? How do we handle isolation, cost attrition? How do we handle noise labels? So there was a lot of concern. And I recall Matt Klein, who was the co-founder, creator of the Envoy project, even jumped out on Twitter and said, you know, Envoy was not designed to be multi-tenancy, and it's probably not worth the effort to make Envoy multi-tenancy. So most recently in the Istio project, we had another round of innovation as part of the Istio Ambient project. We kind of brought this notion of how about layer four, let's do multi-tenancy because it's a very limited function. And then for layer seven, let's do single-tenancy, so you can have layer seven processing isolated to your service account or to your namespace, whichever tenant level you feel comfortable. So I think that's really exciting and also clarifies some of the confusing around how EBPF can, you know, accelerate with service mesh, how EBPF can really bring replacement for proxy or not. So a lot of confusing has been clarified with that. The last, at least, I want to talk about service mesh standards. I remember, I think it was three or four years ago, when SMI, which stands for service mesh interface, was born, right? Unfortunately, I don't think it was the right timing because the service mesh industry was so new and it didn't have all the projects on board. So now I am super excited about the gamma initiative that was born in the Kubernetes networking site. I believe it has the right timing with service mesh industry being way more mature than three years ago. And also, most importantly, it has the right player. I've been joining the gamma meeting myself. It has key contributors from Google, Solo, Hash Club, it has contributed from Microsoft actually, Hash Club was one of the co-lead along with Microsoft and Google. It also have people from iSurveyLand. So it just have the right chemistry and it has the link D team there too. So I'm feeling really good about the gamma standards we're going to bring to the mesh. And hopefully one day, when we look at the service mesh CNCF landscape, you know, regardless of which project you choose, at least you have a single set consistent API. So really excited about that. Now I'm going to pass over to Nick to talk about today's exciting agenda. Okay. So as kind of Lynn's touch on the service mesh landscape has changed quite substantially. I mean, it's grown since the first service mesh come back three years ago. And things are continuing to change. So what we've tried to do today with regard to the schedule is curate a bunch of talks which are interesting to everybody. We know we've got some technology specific stuff, but the sort of the interest level we want to bring to everyone, no matter what sort of you're using. And bear with me, I just need to grab my notes, but we've got some things. So you're going to looking initially, we're going to learn from sort of Casper about how service mesh enables sort of financial institutions to kind of bring security compliance and multi cloud capabilities. So wonderful case study. And of course, I'll in here and just going to come to find a deep dive into the new technologies around Istio ambient mesh, which I think is going to be very interesting indeed. And then of course, delivery deliveries, one of the kind of the key components of service mesh. We've got Brandon from from ship it who's going to be talking about how they've kind of embraced service mesh. And I don't want to forget the lightning talks. I mean, we've got some really fascinating lightning talks. The API gateway spec, which I think is something to definitely keep your eye on when we have a talk on that. And also looking at kind of like some of the maybe architectural patterns that you can use with with service mesh, looking at things like how it can enable domain drum time. And like I'm only touching on a few there. So after lunch, we do have some ebpf. So, you know, how ebpf relates to service mesh is going to be an interesting ongoing sort of issue. And kind of we've got some talks on how it can enable monitoring, but also the sort of the architectural changes that you're you're going to see in your service mesh is due to this technology. So we're going to be talking about how they leverage service mesh again, sort of looking at multi cloud, but, but specifically also maybe some of the things that service mesh cannot solve. And I think that's going to be very interesting. And finishing off the day, we do have a panel on service mesh maturity. So we've got some of the experts from the industry who are going to be kind of discussing where we are right now with, with service mesh. Now a quick note about the, the workshops, the, the workshops are mixed in with the, the main track of the day and they're in the room next door. So they're, they're going to be kind of running, running concurrently with, with this, I do want to, to kind of give a big thank you to, to our sponsors. Um, we got the sponsor slide up there. Cause we don't want to do justice to everybody. So a huge thanks to, to solo, uh, who is our diamond sponsor, uh, literally without the sponsors, service mesh con would not be possible. And, and also to, to our, um, to our other sponsors, we, we have, uh, our gold sponsor with flow mesh. So, you know, thank you very much to, to the both of you. You really help making this event, what it is now without further ado, I think we're going to kick off like we mean to go along. And I'd like to welcome Edith from solo up under the stage. She was going to be talking about some of the, the next big things for Istio.