istio VS falco

Istio is a popular open-source service mesh framework that provides a comprehensive solution for managing, securing, and observing microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes.

Leverage a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd to manage communication between microservices within the Kubernetes cluster. These service meshes can be configured to intercept JMX traffic and enforce access control policies. Benefits:

Open Source and Cloud Computing: A Match Made in Heaven The cloud is accelerating OSS adoption. Cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes [https://kubernetes.io/] and Istio [https://istio.io/], both open-source projects, are revolutionizing how applications are built and deployed across cloud platforms.

Consider the case of Bookinfo, a sample application provided by Istio, rewritten using CloudWeGo's Kitex for superior performance and extensibility.

It is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication, providing features like load balancing, encryption, authentication, and monitoring. Istio deploys sidecar proxies alongside each microservice instance. These proxies handle communication, providing features like load balancing, service discovery, encryption, monitoring and authentication.

5Y old post that sounds like they've done similar here: Caddy Issue Istio Issue but doesn't cover much of the implementation

In a production environment there will be a load balancer setup with an Ingress Controller, Service Mesh or some type of Custom Router. This allows all traffic to be sent to the single load balancer IP address and then route the traffic to a service based on the Domain name or subpath. We are using a NGINX ingress controller but service meshes like Istio have been becoming the most popular solution to use as they offer more segmentation, security and granular control.

Flagger is a progressive delivery tool that enables a Kubernetes operator to automate the promotion or rollback of deployments based on metrics analysis. It supports a variety of metrics including Prometheus, Datadog, and New Relic to name a few. It also works well with Istio service mesh, and can implement progressive traffic splitting between primary and canary releases.

End-to-end data encryption with a service mesh: Using an end-to-end data encryption mechanism with a service mesh like Istio, TLS can secure communication between different microservices within a Kubernetes cluster. This is a popular approach for modern, distributed microservice architectures.

https://github.com/falcosecurity/falco

Like snort, but looks at system calls.

From one noob to another - I had a lot of fun setting up Falco (https://falco.org) and creating custom policies & alerts.

Falco is a well-known open source security solution originally created by Sysdig. It’s a CNCF incubating project and one of the few (as far as I can tell) options on this list that uses eBPF to scan for vulnerabilities.

Use some kind of SIEM or Falco to alert you to threats (you can't stop them, but a human can always intervene)

Falco, is a security project that can help you detect threats from within your cluster.

https://falco.org/ is a security-focused monitoring and alerting with an eBPF option

On the cgo side I want to highlight two talks: one from Loris Cro about dealing with cross-complition difficulties, that the usage of cgo brings, using the Zig language and the other from Jason Dellaluce and Leonardo Grasso about how to extend Falco, a Kubernetes threat detection engine, which is written in C++, with plugins written in Go, explaining the challenges of integrating cgo in both C and Go.