KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

There are few things more tedious than waiting for a long end-to-end test to run. Waiting for a new cluster to spin up, images to build and push - not to mention things like debugging or running on slow internet connections. Unfortunately, these complex setups are hard to avoid, especially if we are testing things deeply integrated into Kubernetes networking, such as CNIs, kube-proxy, services meshes, and more. It doesn't have to be this way! In this talk, I will give a deep dive on how we built out our testing strategy for our Kubernetes networking proxy to not really depend on Kubernetes (or docker, or root). In doing so, I will not only offer a glimpse behind the scenes of Istio development, but also give viewers a deeper understand of how the fundamentals of Kubernetes (Linux primitives like namespaces) work, and how they can be effectively used to improve tests in the Istio ecosystem and beyond.