LinkedIn
The Runbook Crystal Ball: Service Mesh, One Year Out
Thursday, October 15, 2026
9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET
Istio and Linkerd folks don't usually share a stage. During this Runbook session, they will. Istio maintainer Keith Mattix joins Buoyant's Sarah and Flynn for a fireside chat and AMA on where service meshes and platform engineering are headed in a world of AI.
Expect polite but real disagreement on a variety of topics including whether sidecar-based meshes still make sense, whether agents break all our zero-trust assumptions (and how badly), and what inference-based workloads do to a service mesh, and what kinds of things keep us up at night (technologically speaking).
Don't forget to bring your own questions and predictions. We'll be taking your questions live.
What to expect
Runbook LIVE is where Buoyant talks with project maintainers, engineers running open source in production, or shows off new feature demos. Every month, depending on what's worth talking about, we host a fireside chat with a guest, a live demo, an AMA, or a war story from someone's real incident. There are no slides or fixed curriculum. It's a 30-minute live conversation, and you help shape it: drop in questions, vote in polls, and steer where the discussion goes. Whatever we cover, you'll walk away with something you can actually use, not just something you sat through.
What to expect
Runbook LIVE is where Buoyant talks with project maintainers, engineers running open source in production, or shows off new feature demos. Every month, depending on what's worth talking about, we host a fireside chat with a guest, a live demo, an AMA, or a war story from someone's real incident. There are no slides or fixed curriculum. It's a 30-minute live conversation, and you help shape it: drop in questions, vote in polls, and steer where the discussion goes. Whatever we cover, you'll walk away with something you can actually use, not just something you sat through.
Speakers
Keith Mattix
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Istio Maintainer
Keith Mattix is a software engineering leader who enjoys building scalable, high-impact cloud infrastructure. Known for his work across cloud-native ecosystems, service meshes, and distributed systems, he's led key engineering initiatives at companies like Microsoft and Solo.io. He thrives at the intersection of complex architecture and open-source collaboration, frequently contributing to projects like Istio and agentgateway. Outside of deep technical problem-solving, Keith enjoys mentoring engineers and building strong, inclusive tech communities.
Sarah Christoff
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Tech Evangelist
Sarah is a tech evangelist at Buoyant who loves making complex concepts more digestible. She is the self-proclaimed founder of the Leslie Lamport fan club. When she's not writing or streaming, she is running her animal rescue and competing in triathlons. She believes code should be like cats: intelligent, fluffy, and easy to take care of.
Flynn
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Linkerd Evangelist, Buoyant
Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project. Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.