Deployment models for the Istio control plane

In the previous chapters, we installed Istio on minikube, which is one local cluster meant for development purposes on your local workstation. When deploying Istio in enterprise environments, the deployment will be not on minikube but rather on an enterprise-grade Kubernetes cluster. The Service Mesh might run on one Kubernetes cluster or be spread across multiple Kubernetes clusters. It might also be the case that all services will be on one network or may be on different networks with no direct connectivity between them. Every organization will have a different network and infrastructure disposition, and the deployment model for Istio will change accordingly.

What is a cluster?

There are many definitions of a cluster depending on what context they are being referred to. In this section, when we say cluster, we are basically referring to a set of compute nodes hosting containerized applications interconnected with each other. You...