Pilot

Pilot is responsible for the lifecycle of Envoy instances deployed across the Istio service mesh.

Pilot's overall architecture.
Pilot Architecture

As illustrated in the figure above, Pilot maintains a canonical representation of services in the mesh that is independent of the underlying platform. Platform-specific adapters in Pilot are responsible for populating this canonical model appropriately. For example, the Kubernetes adapter in Pilot implements the necessary controllers to watch the Kubernetes API server for changes to the pod registration information, ingress resources, and third party resources that store traffic management rules. This data is translated into the canonical representation. Envoy-specific configuration is generated based on the canonical representation.

Pilot exposes APIs for service discovery, dynamic updates to load balancing pools and routing tables. These APIs decouple Envoy from platform-specific nuances, simplifying the design and increasing portability across platforms.

Operators can specify high-level traffic management rules through Pilot’s Rules API. These rules are translated into low-level configurations and distributed to Envoy instances via the discovery API.