The New Stack Podcast

Eric Brewer on Why Envoy and Istio are the Future of Networking

Episode Summary

For this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Dr. Eric Brewer, Google Fellow and VP of Infrastructure at Google where he’s the architect of Cloud Native systems at massive scale.  He’s also been a Computer Science Professor at UC Berkeley since 1994.   TC caught up with Dr. Brewer at the recent Service Mesh Days in San Francisco. “Istio at its core decouples developers from operations,” Brewer said. That decoupling lets both sides go faster and with more confidence. Traditionally, when developers are writing a service, they worry a lot about the API, what are the methods, how does it work? But when you’re deploying microservices, then you start need to think about other questions. What are the policies that are calling this service?  Does it have quota? Does it have a denial of service?  How does it get authenticated?  How is it secured?  All of these questions that are not about what the API does, but are operations pieces.

Episode Notes

For this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Dr. Eric Brewer, Google Fellow and VP of Infrastructure at Google where he’s the architect of Cloud Native systems at massive scale.  He’s also been a Computer Science Professor at UC Berkeley since 1994.   TC caught up with Dr. Brewer at the recent Service Mesh Days in San Francisco.

“Istio at its core decouples developers from operations,” Brewer said. That decoupling lets both sides go faster and with more confidence.

Traditionally, when developers are writing a service, they worry a lot about the API, what are the methods, how does it work? But when you’re deploying microservices, then you start need to think about other questions.

What are the policies that are calling this service?  Does it have quota? Does it have a denial of service?  How does it get authenticated?  How is it secured?  All of these questions that are not about what the API does, but are operations pieces.