Security and compliance have been enhanced with Zero Trust featuring mTLS, workload identity, and end-to-end encryption without code changes. We leverage FIPS 140-2 / 140-3 validated cryptography for regulated environments and fine-grained authorization using workload identity and HTTP/gRPC routes instead of IP-only rules. For reliability and traffic management, we ensure ultra-high availability with zone/region-aware routing, automated failover, retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking. We can also perform canary/blue-green deployments with automatic rollback. Latency-aware load balancing directs traffic to faster, healthier instances.
To manage costs and operations, we use High Availability Zonal Load Balancing (HAZL) to cut cross-zone traffic and cloud expenses, with some customers reporting significant savings. Additionally, lifecycle automation handles installation, upgrades, and day-2 operations, while mesh expansion automates the inclusion of VMs and non-Kubernetes workloads.