At KubeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, I sat down with Mitch Connors, a principal software engineer at Microsoft and Istio maintainer who sits on the project’s Technical Oversight Committee. Connors joined Microsoft two years ago to work on service mesh operations and recently transitioned into a PM role to ship the Azure Kubernetes Application Network, a fully managed service built on Istio’s ambient mode.
“Success for me looks like most people not knowing what a service mesh…

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