A complete operational deployment guide for configuring an Istio service mesh with mutual post-quantum TLS inside production Kubernetes clusters.
Many cloud engineering teams assume that traffic inside a private Kubernetes virtual network (VPC) is safe. In reality, modern container break-outs, misconfigured pods, and compromised dependencies allow internal attackers to sniff East-West pod communications and extract sensitive microservice API tokens.
Step-by-step instructions on deploying Istio control plane (istiod) and Envoy sidecars built against OpenSSL 3.x post-quantum providers, configuring PeerAuthentication policies, and enabling hybrid mutual TLS (mTLS) across application namespaces.
Empirical performance measurements across 500 microservice pods: evaluating CPU utilization, container memory footprints, and connection keepalive optimizations that maintain sub-2ms inter-pod RPC latencies.