From NLB Sprawl To Mesh Efficiency: How Skyscanner Handles 60M Reque... John Clark & Steven Thwaites

This talk covers how Skyscanner effectively handles 60 million requests per minute by transitioning from traditional east-west network load balancers to a more efficient mesh network using Istio. The speakers, John Clark from Skyscanner and Steven Thwaites from Solo.io, discuss the architectural changes made to reduce costs on AWS while ensuring resilience and compliance. Key topics include the shift to pod-to-pod multicluster communication for east-west traffic, implementing controlled ingress and egress with gateways, and utilizing Istio Ambient Mesh for a zero-trust approach without sidecar overhead. Attendees will gain insights into migration patterns, cost-modeling strategies, and operational lessons for managing large-scale Kubernetes environments.