Istio: Up and Running

Chapter 7. Pilot

Pilot is responsible for programming the data plane, ingress and egress gateways, and service proxies in an Istio deployment. Pilot models the environment of a deployment by combining the Istio configuration from Galley and service information from a service registry such as the Kubernetes API server or Consul. Pilot uses this model to generate a configuration for the data plane and pushes that new configuration to the fleet of service proxies connected to it.

Configuring Pilot

To better understand all aspects of the mesh that concern Pilot, let’s explore the surface area of Pilot’s configuration. As we digest this, understand that Pilot’s dependency on Galley for underlying platform and environment information will continue to increase as the Istio project advances in releases. Pilot has three main sources of configuration:

Mesh configuration

A set of configurations global to the service mesh

Networking configuration

Th configuration for ServiceEntries, DestinationRules, VirtualServices VirtualServices, Gateways, and service proxies

Service discovery

The location and metadata information from registries about the catalog of services resident in one or more underlying platforms

Mesh Configuration

Mesh configuration is a set of global configurations that is static for the installation of the mesh. Mesh configuration is split over three API objects:

MeshConfig (mesh.istio.io/v1alpha1.MeshConfig)

MeshConfig covers configuring how Istio components communicate ...