Journey at the New York Times: Is Sidecar-Less Service Mesh Disappearing Into Infrastructure?
Talkat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · on Thursday, 2025-04-03· at 11:45· Level 1 | Hall Entrance N10 | Room E·
summary
The New York Times migrates from sidecars to Istio ambient mode, running a node-level Rust Z tunnel for mTLS and an Envoy-based waypoint per namespace for layer‑7 policies. Tests show about 25% latency reduction and roughly 50% CPU savings versus per‑pod Envoy sidecars. Migration happens namespace‑by‑namespace with coexisting sidecar and ambient planes; multicluster support exposes gaps still being fixed. Caveats include changed observability signals, some policy behavior differences, and initial z‑tunnel CPU spikes that required upstream fixes.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 1:41The need for a service mesh
- 3:54Transitioning to ambient mode
- 6:50Ambient architecture overview
- 11:11Benefits and multi-tenancy
- 13:42Performance testing
- 15:30Lessons and future outlook
- 18:50Live demo and Q&A
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