Virtual conference presentations lack the dynamic and expressive feeling of a live talk in so many dimensions, and explaining complex concepts can be difficult. Even in person, one of the best ways to convey problems, solutions, and architecture discussions is through diagramming and white boarding. As one of the authors of Istio in Action for Manning Publishers, I’ve gone through many refinements of diagrams to help explain Istio. In this talk, we’ll use live diagramming, architecture sketches, demos and no slides, to illustrate how best to get started with Istio and iteratively adopt it into production. We will cover concepts like sidecar injection, the power of gateways, best practices for tying in PKI, and DNS proxying as we slowly add new workloads to a mesh.