howardjohn's blog

The OSI model attempts to build a model for network communications, where increasingly high level layers are built upon lower layers.

When looking at service mesh (or even general networking) architectures, the basic idea is to send network traffic through some component, which handles various functionality.

In-kernel networking solutions, such as WireGuard, are not always faster than user space.

Exploring an (unfortunately, hypothetical) CI/CD system for end to end tests on Kubernetes.

How to achieve an architecture similar to "Waypoint Proxies" without ambient mesh, or even Istio.

The common messaging around Istio Ambient Mesh is that is a "node proxy."

Fully utilizing buildkit's potentional

How and why to easily these fields

As an open source maintainer, I am reviewing roughly 25 ideas per day - whether they are feature requests, design proposals, or pull requests.

Most people using Kubernetes extensive have already defined alias k=kubectl and are using tools like kubectx.

In the past, Istio has suffered from performance issues from OpenCensus, which was used for metrics reporting.

A little bit of OpenTelemetry, a lot of shell hackery

Go is often praised for its fast build times.

How versioning works in Kubernetes, especially with CustomResourceDefinitions, is a common source of confusion.

Across the ecosystem, a variety of software support policies can be found, where "support" can mean, bug fixes, security patches, and sometimes technical support.

It is a very common misconception that egress policies in Istio can be used for security purposes.

In many languages, on of the things I find myself doing is maping over a list to extract some field.

This post follows the journey Istio has taken over the years to optimize our docker image builds.

Kubernetes Operators are powerful tools when used right, pushing complex operations from human operators to code.

When deploying a proxy outside of Kubernetes, users typically reach for solutions like nginx or Traefik; it's pretty rare to see Kubernetes-native load balancers, like Istio, used outside of the Kubernetes context.

The following graph shows PR approvals for istio/istio since 2020.