Network perimeter security is a focal point of any network admin. When it comes to network perimeter control, our first thought is always inbound security (ingress). However, securing what can leave the network (egress) and where is equally important. In this post, we’re not going to go into the theoretical details of discussing why, exactly, controlling egress traffic is so important or where possible exploitations points are, because there are quite a few posts already.

In today’s blogpost we’re going to be discussing ingress and egress gateways. First, we’ll cover the basics, then we’ll go into detail and explore how they work through a series of practical examples. Ingress and egress gateways are load balancers that operate at the edges of any network receiving incoming or outgoing HTTP/TCP connections. Ingress gateways make it possible to define an entry points into an Istio mesh for all incoming traffic to flow through.