 Hey, everyone, and welcome to IstioCon 2023. Thank you for your patience as we got our events platform up and running off the ground and resolve some technical issues. We're told with good authority that the issues were not Istio-related. Personally, I choose to believe that so many of you have tuned in to IstioCon that we've brought the servers down, but we trust that things are going to be smooth moving forward. And now I'd like to take a moment for my co-host to introduce herself. Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening based on wherever you are watching us from. Welcome back to yet another edition of our annual IstioCon, where we have an amazing lineup of speakers and interesting sessions curated for you about world's most popular service mesh, the Istio service mesh. So myself, Fasila, I'm a steering committee member and maintainer at Istio. You would have already seen me at the last Istio day, Europe, and hopefully in the upcoming Istio day, Chicago as well. I'm a cloud-native developer at Ericsson Software Technology, the open source wing of Ericsson, where we power our 5G telco requirements with cloud-native technologies. Over to you, Mitch, now for a quick intro. Thanks, Fasila. My name is Mitch Connors. I'm an engineer at Aviatrix, where we provide multi-cloud networking services for large enterprises. In particular, I lead the Container Networking Division, where we're going to be pursuing more relevant features for Kubernetes and other container technologies. I've been a member of the Istio project for five years, where I currently serve on the Technical Oversight Committee, as well as usability lead. And this year, I've had the privilege of also serving as a CNCF ambassador, allowing me to try to represent CNCF projects beyond Istio and show how they all connect together. All right. Well, let's take a look at our schedule. All right. Here is a quick preview of the schedule for the first half of day one. We have a couple of talks around Ambient Mesh, including our diamond-sponsor keynote from Google Cloud. And we also have our TOC members giving a quick roadmap update about the upcoming Istio plans. I'm personally really looking forward to the Ambient Mesh talk from my colleague Lynn, which will be really interesting from a beginner perspective and very much needed for a virtual conference like this. Lynn will discuss the new exciting updates through live demos and explain why the changes were made in Ambient Mesh during an architectural deep dive. We also have interesting talks from vendors like Tetrate and Solo, where we get to see some real-world use cases and case studies. Mitch, do you want to talk about the second half schedule? Yeah. And before I move off this slide, I do want to point out that all of these times are listed in the Pacific time zone and all of them are wrong. We got a delayed start to the conference, so you can expect these talks to be starting somewhere around 20 minutes late compared to this schedule. The second half of the day, we've got more jam-packed content, including a Q&A opportunity for everyone in the community to ask questions about Ambient Mesh and about our roadmap. We'll have our TOC members sitting on a panel to answer all of your burning questions. But I'm actually most excited about what comes up at about 11.40 this morning Pacific time, a talk on Istio fault tolerance. This is going to be covering a technology built on top of Istio to provide more than Istio's able to provide out the door in terms of fault tolerance for metastable failures, failures that don't go away with the default, try turning it off and on again. So I'm really looking forward to hearing that talk. Fasila, you want to share with us what's new since our last Istio con in 2022? Yes. So let's just go to the next slide. Istio pioneered the modern service mesh pattern that is the security, traffic routing, and observability using sidecar containers when it was launched way back in 2017. But in 2022, the project continued to drive innovation in the space by introducing a complimentary architecture, as you all know, the Ambient Mesh, offering the same benefits without needing the sidecars. Last year, if you remember the opening keynote of Istio con, we had announced Istio's donation to the CMCF and we are super delighted to see that before the Istio con 2023, we are already a graduated project within the CMCF. Kudos to all our supporters, our developers, well-wishers and more importantly, our end users. We asked some of them how they feel about the news of our CMCF graduation and let's take a quick look at what some of them had to share. Huge congratulations to Istio and to the incredibly talented community of collaborators that made it possible to be part of the CMCF family and I'm really excited for the future of this project. Hey, everyone. My name is Anil Atuluri. I'm a Principal Software Engineer here at Intowet. Congratulations to Istio on CMCF graduation. Kudos to the Istio co-team and the whole community for achieving this huge milestone. I'm super proud to be an Istio user and look forward to its continued success. Congratulations Istio on your graduation. You have joined a community of highly mature projects within the cloud-native ecosystem. Can't wait to see what you all work on next. Congratulations on graduating Istio and to everyone who has collaborated on the project through the past six years to have it reach this milestone. It is amazing to see that Istio is now the third most active CMCF project in terms of PRs and has support for over 20 vendors and dozens of contributing companies. Go Istio. Hi, I'm Kibi. I'm a Software Engineer from Dark Holder. Istio has been consistently being an innovative office source project. It's great to see its graduation. Congratulations on this achievement. When we created Istio six plus years ago, we always wanted to be part of the CMCF. I'm so happy. Not only Istio is part of CMCF, but also graduated from CMCF. Very grateful I'm part of the Istio journey from the day one. Hey, hi. We at Splunk are all very excited to see Istio graduate as an official CMCF project. Thanks to all the maintainers, contributors and users. You make this project awesome. Istio becoming a CMCF project really felt like Istio the company. Through hard work in the project and tremendous support from the CMCF and its community, we're now a graduated project. And I just want to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of Istio over the last six plus years. It's been an amazing journey and I can't wait to see what's next. Thanks everyone. Congratulations Istio in graduating. What a great moment. For me, it's like seeing your kid graduate from concept and idea to such a vast usage in the world. Congratulations to each and every engineer, writer, partner, user who enabled this to happen. Looking forward to more. Thank you. It's an honor from my car. We're happy to see Istio's graduation form since that. Congratulations for all the developers. And we're looking forward to bring Istio to more and more production environment. All of us at IBM are incredibly proud to see the Istio project graduate within the CMCF. IBM has been part of Istio since it was founded and shares a passion for enhancing interoperability, open collaboration and security for cognitive applications. Congratulations to all the Istio contributors who helped achieve this great milestone. Istio, congratulations. You graduated. Now take my advice and just don't think too hard about the student loans. It's so exciting to see Istio move to graduated status within the CMCF. It was only last fall that I made my first contribution to the project and it's an honor to be a part of Istio during this milestone. I can't wait to see what we accomplished next. Really, really happy that Istio is joining this amazing list of CMCF graduates. Congratulations to Istio and thanks a lot to all our supporters. So excited about Istio's graduation. It was great honor to be part of this project. I cannot wait to see what will happen in the future. I'm really excited for Istio becoming the CMCF graduation project. Truly enjoyed the whole journey with the project and I'm looking forward to the big next milestone for the whole community. Congratulations to Istio community on the graduation of Istio at the CMCF. Thanks to our contributors for helping us make this possible and thanks to our users for helping us make Istio the best service mesh. Congratulations to the Istio community on graduation. Whether you're a maintainer or contributor, a tech writer, a release manager or most importantly, a user we couldn't have graduated without you. This is a huge accomplishment and you should be proud. Hey, congratulations on graduation. It's been a great pleasure working in this community, contributing to this project. All the best. I'm so happy to celebrate this major milestone of the graduation of Istio from the CMCF and Kibita program. Thanks to everyone who has helped Istio in this journey. I look forward to seeing how Istio will shape the future of application networking. Good luck and congratulations. Congratulations Istio on graduating. It's been a long road to get there but it's awesome that it's finally happened. Hi everyone. I just wanted to congratulate my fellow contributors on Istio becoming a graduate project of the CMCF. Thanks to everyone for making Istio a great service mesh that's fun to contribute to and operate. Hello, I'm Xiaofeng. I'm a software engineer from Dow Cloud. Seeing Istio graduate from CMCF is really a big step and congratulations on this graduation. Hi, I'm John Keats and I work as a cloud engineer at Wacom in the Netherlands. I'd like to congratulate Istio on becoming a graduated CMCF project and we're very excited to see what the future will hold for us. I'm truly honored to be part of this milestone and I'm excited for the continued growth and the success of Istio. Congratulations to everyone involved. How cool it was to see from so many different friends that we've had in the community throughout the years. Well, among the announcements that we have to celebrate this year at IstioCon are last week's launch of the Istio Certified Associate Program. This is a Linux Foundation training and certification that's now available at the Linux Foundation site. You can check out Istio at Istio Mesh on Twitter if you'd like to get a link to enroll. In particular, the course and certification is gonna cover installing and upgrading Istio, its initial configuration, as well as more advanced concepts like traffic management, resiliency, fault injection, securing your workloads and even more advanced scenarios. So if you'd like to deep dive into Istio and to show off your skills, enroll today in the Linux Foundation's Istio Certified Associate Program. Another thing that we have to celebrate, something that we've looked forward to for quite some time we believed as a project that the donation to the CMCF as well as the graduation of the project would spur and foster more and more engagement in the project. That's really what we were looking for, more contributors, more users, more tech writers, more release managers. And I'm happy to report that year over year 2023 has seen a 32% uptick in new contributors. These are individuals in the community who have never submitted a pull request to Istio before and now they have and that pull request has been merged. So we're seeing that our project is continuing to grow, that that growth in fact is accelerating and we can't wait to see where the community goes from here. Fasila, why don't you tell us what it's like to get started as a new contributor? Yes, talking about contributed experience. Yes, we talk about this at each event and then we keep talking about this everywhere. But yes, we have to, I trade that it's very, very easy to get involved with Istio. So you start by asking your questions and doubts in different forums we have to offer. Start by exploring and experimenting with Istio, raise bugs or issues if you see any and start interacting with our community members. I'm sure you'll find soon a way to make your first contribution to Istio. So beat bug fixes or documentation or even implementing a new feature. We are all here to support you. Fasila, do you remember what it was like to make your first contribution to the Istio project? Yes, Mitch. So I joined Istio like 1.5 years before at a time when my knowledge about service mesh was completely zero, I would say. And I was in a new team internally where my responsibility was to get the five G-Telco requirements prioritized in the cloud native components. And so I was really, really nervous, especially because I had these big features to get done and I was not so sure initially how to get started. But believe me, Istio has a great list of support of maintainers and contributors, quite active on Slack. And all I had to do was just get some support from them and get it done or they always helped me to move forward. I got tremendous support from all the Istio maintainers, I would say. I started as a very regular member and now I'm a maintainer at two working groups and I'm also in the steering committee and even sitting here now doing the opening keynote for IstioCon. So trust me, getting involved in Istio as a new member is far easier than what you really think. And I think it would be nice if we get to know about some of your experiences as well. Yeah, well, we're lucky to have you, Facila. I remember my first experience as a contributor required sign off from multiple work groups. So I had to attend multiple meetings with these engineers I'd never met before, not just from Google, but from IBM and other companies. I didn't know who they were and I was so afraid of looking stupid because I really didn't know a lot about service mesh. I was just getting started. I was very new to it. And I remember afterwards when I had asked a few questions that I felt like were really basic and kind of foolish, I had a few people reach out to me and say, you know what, I'm so glad you asked that question. I didn't know the answer to it either, but I wasn't comfortable asking. I was worried what other people would think and now I understand it better. So my advice, if you're interested in getting involved, jump into one of our community meetings and ask all the questions. You feel like are too obvious to ask. They are not. If you're wondering about the answer to the question, I guarantee you there are others in the community wondering as well. And we will all do better to stop and take time to explain and bring all of us along together. So jump in. Now I wanna talk a little bit about trends in the Istio project. As everyone knows, Istio is based on the Greek word for a sale. Well, I recently had the opportunity to take sailing lessons. And over the course of it, I learned that there's a lot more to sailing than just the sale, which led me to wonder, what about the rest of the boat, right? Our icon is not just a sale, it's a sailboat. If you've been sailing, you know that in order to use a sail, you're going to need things like a mast and a boom to hold the sail in place. You're gonna need lines attached to the mast like halyards and sheets to control the trim of the sail. Make sure you're catching the wind just right. You're also going to need to be able to steer your boat with a helm or a tiller in order to make sure that you're staying at the right angle to the wind for optimal sailing. And when you add all these things together, the rigging for sailing can actually become quite complex as the ship grows. And that's actually what we're seeing in the Istio project as well. What you'll see that we're talking about this year at IstioCon, you'll hear about developments in the project itself, but I think more importantly, you're going to hear about new tools that are built on top of Istio. Tools that you might say are in addition to the sail. We're gonna hear from the Aperture project, which does that sort of dynamic load management for resolving metastable failures that we talked about earlier. We're gonna hear from Mechery, built on top of Istio for Wasm Plugin Management. From Argo, who uses Istio for multi-cluster orchestration and rollouts. And then I'm especially excited to hear from JP Morgan. They've built a platform with Istio and added a feature for service-level objective generation that I think could be valuable to all of us. And that idea of platform engineering is really what Istio is pivoting towards. Most of your developers in the future, I think will not be talking or thinking about Istio in particular. Instead, they'll be using technologies built on top of Istio. They'll be interacting with the platform. When you put all that together into one composite picture, maybe a good picture of Istio, instead of that simple sailboat that looks really nice and minimalist. More along the lines of what a lot of our developers experience looks akin to this. A large sailing yacht or cruising yacht that can handle hundreds of payloads or passengers has multiple sails involved and lots of rigging and equipment to make all of that work together. I think this is really the future of the Istio project and you're gonna hear about it quite a bit. This year at IstioCon. I also wanna take just a few moments as we wrap up to reflect. This will be my last time hosting an IstioCon event. I was privileged to join IstioCon in 2022 as a co-host with Lynn Sun, who you'll hear from shortly. And it's been my privilege to help bring up Vesila as she hosts events. And now it's time to pass the torch on. I think the thing that I value most about my time, not just as host, but in the community has been the people that I've met along the way. In software engineering roles, we tend to change jobs very frequently. We go from one to the next every two to three years. And so often that means we change communities as well. And all of those connections that we've made become more tenuous over time. We lose contact with folks. Well, this is my third job since joining the Istio community at AVATrix. I started at F5 now and then contributing at Google. And now I'm contributing at AVATrix. And along the way, I've been able to maintain those relationships and carry them forward from one role to the next. As a matter of fact, having coworkers for over five years now that have stayed with me, it's the longest experience of coworking that I've ever had in my 18 years as a software engineer. I really value those connections and I look forward to the new ones that I'm gonna make along the way. So it's been great hosting IstioCon and you all are going to be in excellent hands with Vesila and her new co-host moving forward. Thank you so much, mates, for all your support so far for the IstioCon center. Yes, it was so nice working with you. And finally, we have added some information here for the overall benefit of the event. So the view the full IstioCon schedule and the link shared. And as we always say, the CNC of COC, please abide by that whenever you're using social conversations. Please use the official IstioCon hashtag and join the IstioCon Slack channel for any questions you would have for the speakers even after the session is over. You can reach out to the CNC of co-located events, mail ID for any other further questions. Last but not least, yes, we would like to thank our diamond sponsor Google Cloud for their continued support in bringing IstioCon to light every year. And we look forward to your continued support for the upcoming Istio Day North America on November 6th in Chicago. Once again, all the best to all the speakers and we wish you all two days of fun, filled and interesting Istio sessions and interactions. Do you want to add anything more, Mitch, before we conclude? No, thanks, Facila. And thanks, everyone. Lynn's son is gonna be up in just a few seconds with her talk on ambient. We'll see you there.