KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026

During the development of an air-gapped cloud infrastructure, Google engineering teams encountered a major challenge: the heavy operational burden on each service owner to manage common networking functions like load balancing, authorization, mTLS, rate limiting, etc. This was further complicated by the prevalent use of open-source software stacks with limited customisations for such use cases. Consequently, a collective decision was made to implement an Istio service mesh and in-cluster gateways to abstract these operations. However, operating a mesh in an air-gapped environment introduces unique technical and logistical difficulties.

This talks presents methodologies for reliably scaling meshes and gateways both zonally and globally across diverse bare-metal and KubeVirt clusters spanning multiple networks by integrating with established OSS technologies like MetalLB, Cilium ClusterMesh, etc. as well as OpenTelemetry, Fluentbit, Grafana, etc. for robust operational transparency.