Whose Packet Is It Anyway? Life of a Packet Through a Service Mesh

In this talk, Kevin and Doug will trace a packet through its journey between a meshed client and server. They'll explore how the path of a packet changes after installing a service mesh, the additional hops it introduces, and which networking changes ensure the application's behavior isn't affected. First they'll observe the networking rule changes that allow for a proxy to intercept traffic. Once we understand what changes about how a packet travels through the kernel, we'll better understand how to observe it in the following steps. Next, in order to observe this packet on its journey they'll take a dive into the Kubernetes networking debugging space. How do you properly use debug containers to observe traffic between other containers? Once you have debugging capabilities, what tools can we use to observe the traffic? Using these tools, attendees will understand what is happening behind the scenes of a service mesh and how a packet travels within it.