Installation Configuration Profiles

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This page describes the built-in configuration profiles that can be used when installing Istio. The profiles provide customization of the Istio control plane and of the sidecars for the Istio data plane.

You can start with one of Istio’s built-in configuration profiles and then further customize the configuration for your specific needs. The following built-in configuration profiles are currently available:

default: enables components according to the default settings of the IstioOperator API. This profile is recommended for production deployments and for primary clusters in a multicluster mesh. You can display the default settings by running the istioctl profile dump command.
demo: configuration designed to showcase Istio functionality with modest resource requirements. It is suitable to run the Bookinfo application and associated tasks. This is the configuration that is installed with the quick start instructions.
This profile enables high levels of tracing and access logging so it is not suitable for performance tests.
minimal: same as the default profile, but only the control plane components are installed. This allows you to configure the control plane and data plane components (e.g., gateways) using separate profiles.
remote: used for configuring a remote cluster that is managed by an external control plane or by a control plane in a primary cluster of a multicluster mesh.
empty: deploys nothing. This can be useful as a base profile for custom configuration.
preview: the preview profile contains features that are experimental. This is intended to explore new features coming to Istio. Stability, security, and performance are not guaranteed - use at your own risk.
ambient: the ambient profile is designed to help you get started with ambient mesh.
Ambient mode is currently in the Alpha phase.
Please do not use ambient mode in production, and be sure to thoroughly review the feature phase definitions before use.
In particular, there are known performance, stability, and security issues in the alpha release. There are also planned breaking changes, including some that will prevent upgrades. These limitations will be addressed before ambient mode moves to Beta.

The components marked as ✔ are installed within each profile:

	default	demo	minimal	preview	ambient
Core components
`istio-egressgateway`		✔
`istio-ingressgateway`	✔	✔		✔
`istiod`	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
`CNI`					✔
`Ztunnel`					✔

To further customize Istio, a number of addon components can also be installed. Refer to integrations for more details.