Building the next fastest, secure and reliable 5G platform is challenging in its own right but doing that while modernizing your infrastructure and onboarding Cloud-Native Functions (CNFs) from multiple vendors can be a herculean effort

In this talk, we will cover how Istio can be used in 5G platforms to achieve uniform security and visibility across these CNFs deployed in multiple clusters across different sites including edge. However, rolling out Istio at this scale brings its own challenges around lifecycle management, tenant isolation, identity management and visibility beyond metrics and traces. We will cover the lessons learned and tradeoffs between various architectures, in particular:

• Tenancy isolation
• 5G aware telemetry
• Uniform identity between legacy and workloads in the mesh
• Deep packet inspection

Attendees will gain insight into how service providers use Istio at a large scale and what the future holds for a mesh everywhere world from backend to edge to devices