Exploring the components of a control plane

The following diagram summarizes the Istio architecture along with the interaction between various components. We used the Ingress gateway and istio-proxy in the previous chapter so we will not go into further details on those here. We will, however, unravel some of the other components of the Istio control plane not directly depicted in the following illustration.

Figure 3.1 – Istio control plane

Before we delve into the components of the control plane, let’s first get the definition of the term out of the way – the control plane is a set of Istio services that are responsible for the operations of the Istio data plane. There is no single component that constitutes the control plane – rather, there are several.

Let’s look at the first component of the Istio control plane called istiod.

istiod

istiod is one of the Istio control plane components, providing service discovery...