2025-11-08 –, Theater
Migrating from a traditional ingress controller to a service mesh-based solution in a live environment with thousands of internal users presents significant challenges. In this session, we share Bloomberg's experience transitioning from NGINX to Istio as the ingress layer for our internal private cloud platform—a managed service supporting application deployments across the firm. We explore the motivations behind this shift, the architectural and operational changes implemented, and the hurdles encountered during the migration process.
Our journey offers practical insights into planning and executing such a migration with minimal disruption, while also highlighting the new capabilities unlocked through Istio. Attendees will benefit from our lessons learned, best practices, and retrospective advice aimed at helping other engineering teams undertake similar transitions with greater confidence and fewer surprises.
Migrating from a traditional ingress controller in a live environment with thousands of internal users can be challenging — but it doesn’t have to be. In this session, we’ll share our journey transitioning from NGINX to Istio as an ingress solution for Bloomberg's internal private cloud platform that is provided to the firm's engineers as a managed service for application deployment. We’ll discuss what motivated the change, the architectural and operational adjustments we made, the challenges we faced during the migration, and the benefits we achieved post-deployment. Attendees will gain practical insights and best practices for adopting Istio in production environments, including how to plan and execute a migration with minimal disruption -- while unlocking new capabilities.
Kavya Elchuri is a Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, where she works on the Platform as a Service team to help developers deploy cloud-native applications without worrying about infrastructure. She’s passionate about building collaborative, high-trust teams and solving complex technical problems that span multiple layers of the stack. Most recently, Kavya focused on simplifying Kubernetes deployment statuses to make platform debugging accessible-even to users with no prior Kubernetes experience. When she's not writing code, you’ll likely find her surfing, hiking, or exploring new restaurants in search of her next favorite dish.
Sahil Thandra is a Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, where he works in the Platform-as-a-Service team. In this role, Sahil helps provide a managed service that empowers Bloomberg's engineers to seamlessly deploy containerized applications without the complexities of setting up and managing the underlying infrastructure. With a strong foundation in platform engineering, Sahil brings extensive experience in cloud infrastructure, large-scale distributed systems and cluster lifecycle management