Do we need a service mesh to do zero trust?

Not on day one. Start with workload identity (SPIFFE/SPIRE) and signed artifacts. Add mesh when you need fine-grained authZ, mTLS everywhere, and traffic policy. You can enforce image signatures and Terraform checks without a mesh.

How do we handle third-party services (payments, LLM APIs) in a zero-trust model?

Terminate through egress gateways with per-service identities, outbound allowlists, and rate limits. Use separate secrets and keys per service, rotate automatically, and log request metadata only (no payloads for regulated data).

Won’t this slow down developers?

If you push checks to PR time and provide golden-path templates, it speeds teams up by reducing rework. We target <15 minutes feedback for policy issues and automate exceptions with expiries.

What about multi-cloud?

Keep the control planes portable: SPIRE for identity, OPA/Kyverno for policy, Git as the source of truth, Sigstore for signing. Cloud-specific enforcement stays at the edge (SCPs, org policies).

How do we prove compliance to auditors?

Store SBOMs, signatures, provenance, admission logs, and deployment attestations in an immutable bucket and/or OCI registry. Build dashboards that answer: who deployed what, where, under which policy set, and with which approvals.

Security-compliance · Nov 1, 2025 · 10 minute read

Zero Trust That Ships: Turning Policies Into Guardrails, Checks, and Proofs

Q: What about multi-cloud?

Keep the control planes portable: SPIRE for identity, OPA/Kyverno for policy, Git as the source of truth, Sigstore for signing. Cloud-specific enforcement stays at the edge (SCPs, org policies).

Q: How do we prove compliance to auditors?

Store SBOMs, signatures, provenance, admission logs, and deployment attestations in an immutable bucket and/or OCI registry. Build dashboards that answer: who deployed what, where, under which policy set, and with which approvals.

War stories and working patterns for building zero-trust into distributed systems without grinding delivery to a halt.

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Zero Trust That Ships: Turning Policies Into Guardrails, Checks, and Proofs

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist