I will talk about the better external authorization feature in 1.9 that allows users to easily integrate Istio with external authorization system (e.g. OPA, OAuth2).

The better external authorization is the latest improvement that solves a much wanted customer request for better extensibility in the authorization policy.

This feature makes it possible and greatly improves the user experience of many critical use cases, for example, integrate with industry standard auth mechanism (e.g. OAuth2), reuse existing in-house auth system (e.g. OPA) and more.