 Welcome to ServiceMeshCon 2020. I am Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Cong, and I'm very excited to be here today. Today we're going to be exploring the state of the art of ServiceMesh in our industry, explained to us from the makers and the users of the ServiceMesh ecosystem. The goal for today is to capture actionable insights on ServiceMesh, what options we have, best practices, what to do and what not to do when deploying a ServiceMesh in production. But first, let's take a look at why ServiceMesh is important, and let's start by exploring the single most important thing that every modern application must do right, connectivity. And that is because every time a team builds any new application, they create connectivity, and the more distributed and the couple our applications become and the more connectivity we have. The thing is, our services really do talk to each other a lot. If our services were people, they would never be invited at any party. They talk non-stop, over HTTP, over GRPC, over Kafka, database protocols and so on. So let me tell you a story about how I've discovered that this was important. When I was the CTO at MeshAid and we transitioned to microservices, we were so focused on the applications themselves and de-coupling them from the old monolithic codebase that we didn't think about connectivity as much as we should have. We almost took for granted that our cloud vendor would provide fast and reliable connectivity for our services, and we learned a very hard lesson that day. When we ran our new architecture, nothing worked the way it was supposed to work. Connections were slow, unreliable, they were failing all the time. We had to spend a lot of time building and fixing that connectivity ourselves. It was very painful. It was like sailing around the world and focusing so much on the immediate needs like the gear and the boat, but forgetting to bring food on board. And so halfway through, we're going to be having a big problem. We didn't think of connectivity until it was too late. Don't make the same mistake I made. In a digital world, we succeed with reliable, fast and secure connections across all of our services. When connectivity doesn't work, our applications don't work. So if the application teams are in charge of building the products and the architects are in charge of building infrastructure, who is in charge of building connectivity? Is it the application teams or is it the architects? It should be the architects, but today in most organizations, it is the application teams. The problem is when the application teams build service connectivity, they're not doing their job. Their job is to build the products and make the users happy, not managing connectivity. And because of that, they lose efficiency. And we, the architects, lose control of our own infrastructure. With service mesh, we turn the application teams into consumers of connectivity, while providing the right technology for the architects to build it. So today, we will explore a variety of different service mesh implementations and user stories that will help us become the super hero of connectivity and build reliable, distributed software to create value in our business and in the world. And with this, let's get started with the first talk of the day. Enjoy.