How ING scaled 2,000 microservices with a service mesh, covering governance, discovery, and security lessons.

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ING Bank has spent nine years evolving a service mesh to manage over 2,000 microservices across a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Key lessons from their journey include: standardizing cross-cutting concerns like mTLS, authentication, and SLA enforcement rather than having each team reimplement them; building on familiar technology (Java framework plus sidecar proxy) instead of adopting off-the-shelf tools wholesale; using OpenAPI and an internal API marketplace for authoritative service discovery tied to JWT-based authorization; opting for a pull-based control plane and client-side load balancing to avoid central bottlenecks at scale; and investing in enabler teams, bi-weekly knowledge-sharing sessions, and a community of practice to drive organizational adoption. Today, 1,700 workloads across 2,200 applications and 850 teams use the platform in production.

How ING Bank Manages 2,000 Microservices With Service Mesh

ING Bank: A Case Study for Microservices At Scale