> You could use OpenZiti together with Cilium/Calico, there are some distros, eg., https://kubezt.com/ which do that (though in truth, KubeZT has moved to Istio for E-W, uses OpenZiti for N-S. OpenZiti does a lot of things that service mesh technologies do not, for example, extending outside of the cluster (incl. to non-K8S workloads), allowing closing of inbound FW ports, providing a private DNS outside of cluster, removing the need for VPNs, L4 loadbalancers, MPLS, SDWAN, public DNS etc.

Yeah Istio is a hard no for me... And yeah I definitely appreciate that OpenZiti does a lot more than service meshes do! I personally try to avoid service meshes (if I were to use one, I'd go with linkerd).

I'm just not convinced that many people need a service mesh -- I haven't really needed one yet, but maybe I'm just not at the right scale/etc.

> Oh, I should note too, while we have a bunch of ways to deploy OpenZiti on K8S today, we are in the process of building/releasing an admission controller and an ingress controller for OpenZiti.

This is awesome -- I really like my current admission controller though (Traefik), it's FANTASTIC. I think moving ingress controllers might be a large lift for people (it would be for me).

> Whats the project you work on?

I don't really work on it actively these days (haven't in a while) but https://nimbusws.com

Looking forward to picking it back up more actively in the future though, for now I use it for some small background services.

Ahh, thats cool. Note, the app embedded capabilities of OpenZiti becomes very interesting in this scenario, for example, our Python SDK working with Boto3 for AWS S3 - https://blog.openziti.io/extend-access-to-a-private-s3-bucke....

I get that. Would need to check if we can integrate Ziti into Traefik in the same way we did for Nginx (https://blog.openziti.io/nginx-zerotrust-api-security) and Caddy (https://blog.openziti.io/put-some-ziti-in-your-caddy), which we did respectively using the C and Golang SDKs. Therefore you wouldn't need to change your ingress, you would just load Ziti as a module in it.

> I get that. Would need to check if we can integrate Ziti into Traefik in the same way we did for Nginx (https://blog.openziti.io/nginx-zerotrust-api-security) and Caddy (https://blog.openziti.io/put-some-ziti-in-your-caddy), which we did respectively using the C and Golang SDKs. Therefore you wouldn't need to change your ingress, you would just load Ziti as a module in it.

Yeah, this is why I was thinking that the easiest way to integrate would be a sidecar (and in general for random web serving payloads). I'm not ruling it out, but this was the major stopper -- it seemed easier to just rely on Cilium/Calico underneath to keep east-west comms encrypted between apps and k8s nodes.

> This is awesome -- I really like my current admission controller though (Traefik), it's FANTASTIC. I think moving ingress controllers might be a large lift for people (it would be for me).

Clarification: You could use Traefik's ingress controller in tandem with a hypothetical OpenZiti ingress controller. You'd set `ingressClass: openziti` on those Ingress resources you wish OpenZiti to handle. Nothing would prevent you from creating two Ingress resources for the same ClusterIP service: one each for Traefik and OpenZiti.