Istio at KubeCon Europe 2025
A quick recap of Istio at KubeCon Europe, at Excel London.
The open source and cloud native community gathered from the 1st to 4th of April in London for the first KubeCon of 2025. The four-day conference, organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, was “big” for Istio, as our presence was seen almost everywhere - from the keynotes to the project pavilion.
We kick-started the activities in London with Istio Day - a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-located event on April 1st. The event was well-received, showcasing lessons learned from running Istio in production, hands-on experiences, and featuring maintainers from across the Istio ecosystem.
Istio Day kicked off with an opening keynote from the Program Committee chairs, Keith Mattix and Denis Jannot. The keynote was followed by the much-awaited talk from Microsoft about Istio Ambient Mesh support on Windows. We had a very interesting talk by Lior Lieberman from Google and Erik Parienty from Riskified on architecting Istio for large scale deployments, followed by a talk from Kiali maintainers Josune Cordoba and Hayk Hovsepyan, from RedHat, about troubleshooting Istio ambient mesh with Kiali 2.0.
Istio multi-cluster is always a hot topic, and Pamela Hernandez from BlackRock nailed it in the talk on navigating the maze of multi-cluster Istio, diving into the complexities of implementing a multi-cluster Istio service mesh at scale, covering a hub-and-spoke model. The audience was excited when Denis Jannot from Solo.io ran a live, representative benchmark at scale with Istio Ambient, debunking all myths about service mesh overhead and complexity. The event witnessed how Istio played a pivotal role in managing traffic and ensuring data security, ultimately enabling a secure and efficient AI platform that meets enterprise standards when SAP presented GenAI platform challenges in multi-tenant environments. Rounding out the talks was a lightning talk by Rob Salmond from SuperOrbit on How to get Istio help, which involved the best places to go, how to ask good questions, and avoid common missteps.
The slides for all the sessions can be found in the Istio Day EU 2025 schedule.
Our presence at the conference did not end with Istio Day. The first day keynote of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon started with an Istio project lightning talk from Mitch Connors.
There were several keynotes on the main stage where Istio was mentioned. At the opening day keynotes, Vasu Chandrasekhara, from SAP, announced the NeoNephos Foundation under the Linux Foundation Europe - a major step forward for Digital Sovereignty in Europe, and Istio was mentioned as a supported project.
Stephen Connolly shared HSBC’s journey with Kubernetes and also discussed plans to adopt Istio ambient mesh to save on costs. Ant Group, who won the CNCF End User Award, also highlighted their Istio usage. Idit Levine and Keith Babo, from Solo.io, announced a free cost-saving estimator and migration tool for Istio ambient mesh. Faseela K had a Telco end user panel keynote on Cloud Native Evolution in Telecom with Vodafone, Orange, and Swisscom, which again highlighted Istio usage for Telco Network Functions.
Istio’s maintainer track session was also well received, where Raymond Wong, from Forbes, joined maintainers Louis Ryan and Lin Sun to discuss about Forbe’s journey to Istio ambient in production. It was a packed room with a lot of questions afterwards.
A Contribfest session led by Mitch Connors (Microsoft), Daniel Hawton (Solo.io), and Jackie Maertens (Microsoft) walked through the structure of the Istio repositories, where each component’s code lives, finding issues to resolve, setting up and using integration tests, and making first contributions to the project as well as resources for getting development environments up and running and places to go to get assistance.
Istio maintainers Lin Sun and Faseela K had a book signing event post their Istio Phippy book reading session on “Izzy saves the Birthday”.
The following sessions at KubeCon were based on Istio and almost all of them had a huge crowd in attendance:
- Project Lightning Talk: What’s New in Istio?
- Sponsored Demo: Bringing Agentic AI to Cloud Native - Introducing kagent
- “Izzy Saves the Birthday” - A Story-Driven Live Demo Exploring the Magic of Service Mesh
- Trino and Data Governance on Kubernetes
- Journey at the New York Times: Is Sidecar-Less Service Mesh Disappearing Into Infrastructure?
- Lightning Talk: High Availability With ‘503: Unavailable’
Istio had a kiosk in the project pavilion, with the majority of questions asked being around extensibility and multi cluster enhancements. Many of our members and maintainers offered support at our kiosk, helping us answer all the questions from our users.
Many of our TOC members and maintainers also offered support at the booth, where a lot of interesting discussions happened around Istio ambient mesh as well.
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to our gold sponsor Microsoft Azure, for supporting Istio Day Europe! Last but not least, we would like to thank our Istio Day Program Committee members, for all their hard work and support!
