Every microservice in production must be secured. In order to ensure this, there is a significant additional effort compared to a monolithic system due to the high number of services. If the operation then still takes place in a public cloud, neither the communication within the infrastructure of the cloud provider nor the connection via the Internet may be unencrypted. In addition, corresponding authorization checks must take place in each individual service.

This session shows how easy and effortless it is to implement security measures with a service mesh tool like Istio. With a few small Istio rules, all communication in the service mesh is secured with mutual TLS (mTLS). Basic checks of service-to-service communication and end-user authorization using JWT can also be delegated to Istio. The extended authorization checks within a Java service are illustrated using the MicroProfile specifications.