Service Mesh, Istio, and EJBCA

2023-04-04

Service mesh is an infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication within containerized environments. Security, load balancing, traffic management, and service discovery are all features that can be provided by it.

A service mesh is typically used in a container environment when there are many microservices that need to communicate with each other, and you want to improve their reliability, observability, and security. By providing a centralized control plane, a service mesh can help you achieve these goals.

A service mesh uses mTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security) to encrypt and authenticate data between services. In order to implement mTLS, you should integrate your service mesh with a certificate management system, a solution that provides Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)/Certificate Authority (CA) functionality, and that supports automatic certificate provisioning and rotation. This will simplify the procedure for managing and renewing certificates for secure communication.

Istio is a popular open-source service mesh platform. Istio is built on top of open-source technologies such as Envoy Proxy and Kubernetes.

Integrate certificate issuance and usage with your service mesh

Here are some steps you can take to integrate certificate issuance and usage with your service mesh:

Deploy and configure a PKI/CA solution. You should choose a system that is compatible with your service mesh and meets your security and scalability requirements.
Configure your service mesh to use the PKI/CA: You will need to configure your service mesh to use the certificate management solution to provision and renew certificates for secure communication between services. This involves configuring a certificate profile for the mTLS certificates, leveraging cert-manager, the EJBCA CSR-API Signer, or Kubernetes CSR-API to issue the certificates, and distributing the trust chain of the CA that shall issue the mTLS certificates in the service mesh.
Enable mTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security): mTLS is a security protocol that provides end-to-end encryption and authentication between services in a Service Mesh as described above.

Try it out with EJBCA today

Istio's open-source service mesh comes with out-of-the-box support for mTLS with self-signed certificates. However, self-signed certificates are highly unsuitable for production environments.

By integrating Istio with EJBCA, you get one trusted, scalable, and future-proof PKI that can be leveraged both for your cloud service mesh infrastructure as well as for other external resources.

You can get started with EJBCA and certificates for your Istio service mesh by watching our YouTube playlist: Get started with EJBCA and Istio.