I presented on Apri 28th (April 29th JST): “Accelerating ZOZOTOWN Modernization with Istio” at IstioCon 2022. It was an awesome experience for me to present for the global technology conference like IsitoCon.

You can find the slides for my presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/yokawasa/accelerating-zozotown-modernization-with-istio

About the session

It’s about an application modernization of ZOZOTOWN using Istio. ZOZOTOWN is the largest fashion online shopping website in Japan run by ZOZO (https://corp.zozo.com/en/). It was launched in 2004, implimented as monoliths, and became a big fat monolith application built upon onprem as it grew. In last 3 years they have worked on ZOZOTOWN modernization project that they call ‘ZOZOTOWN replace’ where they achived gradual migration to kubernetes-based microservice architecture and adopted istio / service mesh as a key enabler for our new ZOZOTOWN platform. Topics covered in the presentation will include:

  • ZOZO’s gradual migration storategy
  • How they integrated Isito into their microservice platform where they had their existing in-house API Gateway
  • How they achieved zero downtime migration to istio-based microservice architecture
  • Further Istio usage at ZOZO to achive more sophisticated DevOps experience

You can find the session info on the event site as well: https://events.istio.io/istiocon-2022/sessions/accelerating-zozotown-modernization/

Updated on May 16, 2022 - Video is here:

Why I applied for the CFP?

I applied for the Call For Proposals (CPF) for the IstioCon 2022 with the following motivations:

  1. To share knowlege and usecase of Istio / service mesh with the community
  2. To raise your technical presence of the company in the area of Istio service mesh
  3. To step out of my comfort zone by presenting in English (my 2nd language)

The biggest motivation is #3 - giving presentation in English. As a Japanese, I’m pretty comfortable with the presentation in Japanese (see my presentations history at public event) but NOT with the one in English. There was the time when I was a part of global team and had many chances to give English presentation. But in my current role I haven’t have a chance for about 2.5 years, thus I got to be reluctant to do in English and even worse I became conscious of my weakness in presenting myself in English. So, applying for the CFP (ie. to give the presentaion in English) was to overcome my weakness.

What I’ve learnt through event

The challenge turned out very well. After the challenge, I got to be feeling very positive about joining the global event like IstioCon. Also I’ve learnt alot from the event.

  • There is no barriers to joining the global event except language and timezone. Speaking of the language, there is more chance to pre-record the presentation which allow non native English speakers elaborate and spend as much time on the presentation to get over language difficulties. All you need is motivation and guts
  • There are alot more things to do with Istio / service mesh to improve the application modernization that I’m working on. Speed of innovation in this are is very fast and there are many advanced Istio service mesh usecase in the world to catch up with. If you’d like to view a talk you missed, you can replay content if you’re registered at https://events.istio.io/istiocon-2022/, and also sessions records will be available on YouTube in the next few weeks (ref).

These are the biggest harvests I’ve gained from attending this event.

I really thank you to the organizers of IstioCon and the community for the awesome event!

BTW - Big news on Istio and CNCF

There was a big news during IstioCon day1 keynote - the Istio project has applied to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Here is the PR for the proposal: https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/827

I’m super excited about it!