This is a story of struggle, tradeoffs, and triumphs. Istio, as you may know, is a mission-critical piece of software for securing and connecting microservices across platforms. However, it can be daunting to introduce, operationalize, or adopt it successfully.

In this talk, we dig into T-Mobile’s journey of adopting Istio across 100+ clusters to support microservices for fraud detection, billing, sales and APIs across many teams. The journey was not all rainbows and unicorns. We cover things such as tenancy, install/upgrade, feature adoption, CI/CD integration, and architecture tradeoffs. We see first-hand lessons learned around:

• The importance of iteration
• Structured boundary and isolation
• Approaches to multi-cluster
• Stateful workloads in Istio
• Team processes

Attendees of this talk will leave with a better understanding of how a large organization runs Istio to secure, and observe microservices in a large-scale deployment with all of its pros and cons.