Istios Mixer: Policy Enforcement with Custom Adapters [I]

The Istio service mesh provides a highly extensible platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Istios highly extensible nature is one of the main selling points as it allows you to enforc …

The Istio service mesh provides a highly extensible platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Istio’s highly extensible nature is one of the main selling points as it allows you to enforce your own organization-specific policies across large fleets of microservices. At the same time, new technology always has a learning curve, and with all this extensibility and generality the task can be quite daunting. In this talk, Limin Wang (Software Engineer at Google) and Torin Sandall (Technical Lead of the Open Policy Agent project) explain how Istio’s Mixer works and lead a deep dive into Mixer Adapter development. The talk shows (with demos) how the Mixer Adapter model enables custom policy enforcement and how the model is used to integrate third party policy engines like the Open Policy Agent. This talk is targeted at platform engineers interested in using the Istio service mesh to enforce custom policies in their microservices. The talk also provides new ideas about the kinds of policies that can be enforced in Istio today.