Istio claims that it helps to connect, secure, control and observe services. We’ve blogged a lot about connect, even more about observe, and also had a few articles about secure. But so far, we haven’t really touched control. This post tries to fill that gap, and discusses Istio’s access control model, or more specifically AuthorizationPolicies. Architecture Istio Authorization can be used to enforce access control rules between workloads. It basically answers the question: who can access what, under which specific conditions?

In the past few weeks we’ve been blogging about the advanced, enterprise-grade security features we are building into our open source PaaS, Pipeline. If you’d like to review these features, please read this series: Security series: Authentication and authorization of Pipeline users with OAuth2 and Vault Dynamic credentials with Vault using Kubernetes Service Accounts Dynamic SSH with Vault and Pipeline Secure Kubernetes Deployments with Vault and Pipeline Policy enforcement on K8s with Pipeline The Vault swiss-army knife The Banzai Cloud Vault Operator Vault unseal flow with KMS Kubernetes secret management with Pipeline Container vulnerability scans with Pipeline Kubernetes API proxy with Pipeline