From Brownfield to Greenfield: Istio Service Mesh Journey at Freddie Mac

Freddie Mac is one of the two mortgage loan corporations in the United States managing trillions of dollars of assets across the country. Our infrastructure is spread across different Kubernetes provi …

Freddie Mac is one of the two mortgage loan corporations in the United States managing trillions of dollars of assets across the country. Our infrastructure is spread across different Kubernetes providers, hardware load balancers, and large swaths of virtual machines. In this talk, we describe our service mesh adoption journey in a highly regulated financial compliance environment. We will discuss both greenfield and brownfield environments, to gain full visibility and traffic management capabilities using Istio/Envoy. We will highlight the changes to our GitOps development workflow, changes to our age old organizational practices, and how the service mesh journey forced us to foster deeper co-operation between traditionally siloed security, platform and application development teams as we tried to weave a mesh over the old and new.