In this talk we will discuss how Ericsson is using istio in its modernised 5G Cloud platform to onboard various Cloud Native Functions seamlessly and how our cloud native infrastructure evolution using istio is solving some of the problems in the areas of security, observability and traffic management. Integration of istio in an end to end 5G platform has come with its own challenges, and we would like to highlight the various conscious choices we had to opt in terms of tenant isolation, onboarding of legacy workloads, enhancing security, dual-stack enablement etc. We will use this as an opportunity to bring more insight to how to build a fast and secure cloud native platform for 5G applications, and also to raise more awareness in the community for enhancing istio for telco use-cases. This session will give an overview of how Ericsson’s istio journey has evolved over the years, and how istio can be leveraged for realising the needs of 5G cloud native platforms.