Istio Certified Associate case studies
Istio Certified Associate · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Istio Certified Associate (ICA) is a pre-professional certification from the Linux Foundation, originally developed by Tetrate, aimed at engineers, CI/CD practitioners, and anyone with a special interest in Istio. It confirms foundational knowledge of Istio principles, terminology, and best practices and the ability to set up Istio, with a focus on enhancing the performance, reliability, and security of applications running on Kubernetes-based container orchestration systems. The Istio Certified Associate case studies are 5 cases and about 4,921 words.
1Revision-Based Canary Upgrade Breaks One Namespace
Your platform team operates Istio 1.17.3 installed with istioctl using the default profile: three istiod replicas, an istio-ingressgateway with an HPA (min 3, max 12), 240 workloads across 12 namespaces, all injected through the namespace label istio-injection=enabled. A single shared EnvoyFilter lives in istio-system and adds a custom header to every inbound listener at the HTTP FILTER stage.
911 words, about 5 min2Canary Weight Sends 10% of Checkout Traffic to an Empty Subset
An online retailer runs checkout in namespace shop: a v1 Deployment with 8 replicas and a v2 Deployment with 4 replicas that adds a discount engine. A DestinationRule declares subsets v1 (selector version: v1) and v2 (selector version: v2), while the v2 pods are labelled version: v2.0.
999 words, about 5 min3STRICT mTLS Migration Versus Plaintext Batch Jobs and a JWT Policy
Namespace retail runs 40 Deployments, all with sidecars. Namespace legacy-batch runs 6 pods with injection disabled; those pods call retail's pricing service over plaintext HTTP on port 8080 and will not be retired for 90 days.
982 words, about 5 min4One EnvoyFilter, 1,200 Proxies, and a Melted Control Plane
After a platform engineer applies a 200-line EnvoyFilter in istio-system to add a custom x-tenant header, the mesh degrades. There are 1,200 sidecar proxies, 900 Services and 5,000 endpoints.
1,025 words, about 5 min5Onboarding a Namespace to Ambient Mode With L7 Policy
Your cluster runs Istio 1.22 in sidecar mode for eight namespaces. The analytics namespace (12 Deployments serving gRPC on 9090 and HTTP on 8080) is being moved to ambient mode.
1,004 words, about 5 min