Summary

This chapter provided you with details about Istio control plane components including istiod and its architecture. We also read about the Istio operator, the CLI, and how certificate distribution works. The Istio control plane can be deployed in various architecture patterns, and we had an overview of some of these deployment patterns as well.

After covering the Istio control plane, we read about Envoy, a lightweight, highly performant l3/l4/l7 proxy. It provides a range of configurations via the listener and cluster subsystems to control request processing. The filter-based architecture is easy to use, as well as extensible, as new filters can be written in Lua, Wasm, or C++ and can easily be plugged into Envoy. Last but not least is the ability of Envoy to support dynamic configuration via xDS APIs. Envoy is the best choice for the Istio data plane because of its flexibility and performance when serving as a proxy, as well as its easy configurability via xDS APIs, which...