Abstract
Every organisation wants to deliver exceptional digital experience to wow it’s customers and in the current era this experience is not just limited to websites or apps instead it is an omnichannel experience(wearable tech, voice and IoT). This is where Drupal shines and using API-first Drupal as a central data service as a part of decoupled site, one can deliver the exceptional end user experience to its users.


Kubernetes has evolved into a strategic platform for deploying and scaling applications across a multitude of infrastructure. It’s built-in-abstractions for efficiently deploying, scaling and managing applications makes it a preferred orchestration system.


To deliver exceptional digital experience at scale using Drupal as a central data services, Kubernetes is indeed a strategic platform. But decoupled systems bring some inherent problems with them like traffic management, security, authentication, rate limiting and observability and typically all organisation would need these capabilities and Istio solves most of these problems which arise in distributed systems.


Learning Objectives
Decoupled systems add a great values like discrete services which are independent and all other benefits microservices provide but they come up some problems like security, lack of observability/debuggability, traffic management and resilience. Image a case where rouge microservice can put your entire application down. Hence solving these problems are important and we would focus on how these problems can be solved at scale.


Topics


Brief introduction to Kubernetes


Introduction to Istio and it’s uses


How Istio can help where Drupal is used a backend content service with a focus on security, traffic management, resilience and observability and we will answer how Istio can solve some of challenges like


How to secure inter-service communication?


How to avoid cascading failure where one rogue service might bring everything down?


How to debug and trace the bug in case of an issue? Is there a bug in my react app or middleware or Drupal(Backend Service)?


How to find and track performance issues?


The session will comprise of a live demo of a decoupled applications comprising of react app, nodeJS middleware and Drupal as a content service.


Target Audience
This session is targeted for:


DevOps Engineers: They will learn how they can provide seamless developer experience to developers and reduce their pain :)
Developers: They will learn how they can use available tooling for better observability and debuggability and work with operations team without being a pain :)
Project Managers