Grafana Dashboard Development Workflow

How I iterate on Grafana dashboards

May 30, 2024 · 3 min

Podless Kubernetes

Sidecarless? Why not podless?

May 7, 2024 · 6 min

Testing a Kubernetes Networking Implementation Without Kubernetes

How Istio tests its networking proxy without Kubernetes, Docker, or root.

April 25, 2024 · 7 min

Securing Prometheus with Istio Ambient

tl;dr: it just works

April 15, 2024 · 2 min

Building a better Kubernetes Client

Like most other Kubernetes controllers in, Istio is written in Go and relies on the client-go library. While this provides an excellent low-level building block, usage in higher level code in Istio led to a variety of issues that led us to develop our own higher level, opinionated client for Istio. This post covers the issues we faced and how we incrementally solved them. Background knowledge At a high level, client-go provides a few layers for interactions with the API server: ...

March 23, 2024 · 7 min

Advanced Helm Techniques

Rage bait for YAML templating haters

February 27, 2024 · 4 min

Opinionated Istio Feature Recommendations

Which features I recommend using, or not using, in Istio

February 6, 2024 · 5 min

Analyzing Go Binary Sizes

In Analyzing Go Build Times, I went over how to analyze and understand Go build times, and what factors impact build times. A close cousin to build times is build sizes. Large binaries can lead to a variety of issues such as: Generally, slower build times Increased costs of storage Increased costs and time to distribute Increased memory usage at runtime (more on this in another article, hopefully) So its generally nice to keep them small. ...

 · January 6, 2024 · 8 min

Truly Extensible Proxies

Exploring an extreme service mesh architecture to maximize extensibility.

October 13, 2023 · 13 min

Proxy Layers

The OSI model attempts to build a model for network communications, where increasingly high level layers are built upon lower layers. This is only slightly useful in practice, as the real world is not so simple. In service mesh, generally discussion is reduced to L4 and L7, or TCP and HTTP. This oversimplifies the problem, leading to some confusion. Thinking in terms of termination Simply saying "HTTP" is not really clear about what is going on. Instead, I think its more useful to think about what layer we terminate. ...

October 12, 2023 · 4 min