Service Mesh

Name of the secret the certificate and its key will be stored into. If it is empty, it will not be stored into a secret. Instead, the certificate and its key will be stored into a hard-coded directory.

The DNS names for the certificate. A certificate may contain multiple DNS names.

Address of the server implementing the Istio Mesh Configuration protocol (MCP). Can be IP address or a fully qualified DNS name. Use fs:/// to specify a file-based backend with absolute path to the directory.

Use the tlssettings to specify the tls mode to use. If the MCP server uses Istio mutual TLS and shares the root CA with Pilot, specify the TLS mode as ISTIOMUTUAL.

Describes the source of configuration, if nothing is specified default is MCP

Optional: only one of distribute or failover can be set. Explicitly specify loadbalancing weight across different zones and geographical locations. Refer to Locality weighted load balancing If empty, the locality weight is set according to the endpoints number within it.

Optional: only failover or distribute can be set. Explicitly specify the region traffic will land on when endpoints in local region becomes unhealthy. Should be used together with OutlierDetection to detect unhealthy endpoints. Note: if no OutlierDetection specified, this will not take effect.

Originating locality, ‘/’ separated, e.g. ‘region/zone/sub_zone’.

Map of upstream localities to traffic distribution weights. The sum of all weights should be == 100. Any locality not assigned a weight will receive no traffic.

Originating region.

Destination region the traffic will fail over to when endpoints in the ‘from’ region becomes unhealthy.

Address of the server that will be used by the proxies for policy check calls. By using different names for mixerCheckServer and mixerReportServer, it is possible to have one set of Mixer servers handle policy check calls while another set of Mixer servers handle telemetry calls.

NOTE: Omitting mixerCheckServer while specifying mixerReportServer is equivalent to setting disablePolicyChecks to true.

Address of the server that will be used by the proxies for policy report calls.

Disable policy checks by the Mixer service. Default is false, i.e. Mixer policy check is enabled by default.

Allow all traffic in cases when the Mixer policy service cannot be reached. Default is false which means the traffic is denied when the client is unable to connect to Mixer.

Enable session affinity for Envoy Mixer reports so that calls from a proxy will always target the same Mixer instance.

Port on which Envoy should listen for incoming connections from other services.

Port on which Envoy should listen for HTTP PROXY requests if set.

Connection timeout used by Envoy. (MUST BE >=1ms)

Automatic protocol detection uses a set of heuristics to determine whether the connection is using TLS or not (on the server side), as well as the application protocol being used (e.g., http vs tcp). These heuristics rely on the client sending the first bits of data. For server first protocols like MySQL, MongoDB, etc., Envoy will timeout on the protocol detection after the specified period, defaulting to non mTLS plain TCP traffic. Set this field to tweak the period that Envoy will wait for the client to send the first bits of data. (MUST BE >=1ms)

If set then set SO_KEEPALIVE on the socket to enable TCP Keepalives.

Class of ingress resources to be processed by Istio ingress controller. This corresponds to the value of “kubernetes.io/ingress.class” annotation.

Name of theKubernetes service used for the istio ingress controller.

Defines whether to use Istio ingress controller for annotated or all ingress resources.

Flag to control generation of trace spans and request IDs. Requires a trace span collector defined in the proxy configuration.

File address for the proxy access log (e.g. /dev/stdout). Empty value disables access logging.

Format for the proxy access log Empty value results in proxy’s default access log format

Encoding for the proxy access log (text or json). Default value is text.

This flag enables Envoy’s gRPC Access Log Service. See Access Log Service for details about Envoy’s gRPC Access Log Service API.

Default proxy config used by the proxy injection mechanism operating in the mesh (e.g. Kubernetes admission controller) In case of Kubernetes, the proxy config is applied once during the injection process, and remain constant for the duration of the pod. The rest of the mesh config can be changed at runtime and config gets distributed dynamically.

Set the default behavior of the sidecar for handling outbound traffic from the application. If your application uses one or more external services that are not known apriori, setting the policy to ALLOWANY will cause the sidecars to route any unknown traffic originating from the application to its requested destination. Users are strongly encouraged to use ServiceEntries to explicitly declare any external dependencies, instead of using allowany, so that traffic to these services can be monitored.

Enables client side policy checks.

Unix Domain Socket through which Envoy communicates with NodeAgent SDS to get key/cert for mTLS. Use secret-mount files instead of SDS if set to empty.

ConfigSource describes a source of configuration data for networking rules, and other Istio configuration artifacts. Multiple data sources can be configured for a single control plane.

This flag is used to enable mutual TLS automatically for service to service communication within the mesh, default false. If set to true, and a given service does not have a corresponding DestinationRule configured, or its DestinationRule does not have TLSSettings specified, Istio configures client side TLS configuration appropriately. More specifically, If the upstream authentication policy is in STRICT mode, use Istio provisioned certificate for mutual TLS to connect to upstream. If upstream service is in plain text mode, use plain text. If the upstream authentication policy is in PERMISSIVE mode, Istio configures clients to use mutual TLS when server sides are capable of accepting mutual TLS traffic. If service DestinationRule exists and has TLSSettings specified, that is always used instead.

The trust domain corresponds to the trust root of a system. Refer to SPIFFE-ID

The trust domain aliases represent the aliases of trust_domain. For example, if we have

trustDomain: td1
trustDomainAliases: ["td2", "td3"]

Any service with the identity td1/ns/foo/sa/a-service-account, td2/ns/foo/sa/a-service-account, or td3/ns/foo/sa/a-service-account will be treated the same in the Istio mesh.

The default value for the ServiceEntry.export_to field and services imported through container registry integrations, e.g. this applies to Kubernetes Service resources. The value is a list of namespace names and reserved namespace aliases. The allowed namespace aliases are:

• - All Namespaces . - Current Namespace ~ - No Namespace

If not set the system will use “*” as the default value which implies that services are exported to all namespaces.

‘All namespaces’ is a reasonable default for implementations that don’t need to restrict access or visibility of services across namespace boundaries. If that requirement is present it is generally good practice to make the default ‘Current namespace’ so that services are only visible within their own namespaces by default. Operators can then expand the visibility of services to other namespaces as needed. Use of ‘No Namespace’ is expected to be rare but can have utility for deployments where dependency management needs to be precise even within the scope of a single namespace.

For further discussion see the reference documentation for ServiceEntry, Sidecar, and Gateway.

The default value for the VirtualService.exportto field. Has the same syntax as ‘defaultserviceexportto’.

If not set the system will use “*” as the default value which implies that virtual services are exported to all namespaces

The default value for the DestinationRule.exportto field. Has the same syntax as ‘defaultserviceexportto’.

If not set the system will use “*” as the default value which implies that destination rules are exported to all namespaces

The namespace to treat as the administrative root namespace for Istio configuration. When processing a leaf namespace Istio will search for declarations in that namespace first and if none are found it will search in the root namespace. Any matching declaration found in the root namespace is processed as if it were declared in the leaf namespace.

The precise semantics of this processing are documented on each resource type.

Locality based load balancing distribution or failover settings.

Configures DNS refresh rate for Envoy clusters of type STRICT_DNS

The flag to disable report batch.

When disablereportbatch is false, this value specifies the maximum number of requests that are batched in report. If left unspecified, the default value of reportbatchmax_entries == 0 will use the hardcoded defaults of istio::mixerclient::ReportOptions.

When disablereportbatch is false, this value specifies the maximum elapsed time a batched report will be sent after a user request is processed. If left unspecified, the default reportbatchmax_time == 0 will use the hardcoded defaults of istio::mixerclient::ReportOptions.

Specify if http1.1 connections should be upgraded to http2 by default. if sidecar is installed on all pods in the mesh, then this should be set to UPGRADE. If one or more services or namespaces do not have sidecar(s), then this should be set to DONOTUPGRADE. It can be enabled by destination using the destinationRule.trafficPolicy.connectionPool.http.h2UpgradePolicy override.

Name to be used while emitting statistics for inbound clusters. By default, Istio emits statistics with the pattern inbound|||. For example inbound|7443|grpc-reviews|reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local. This can be used to override that pattern.

A Pattern can be composed of various pre-defined variables. The following variables are supported. %SERVICE% - Will be substituted with name of the service. %SERVICEFQDN% - Will be substituted with FQDN of the service. %SERVICEPORT% - Will be substituted with port of the service. %SERVICEPORTNAME% - Will be substituted with port name of the service.

Following are some examples of supported patterns for reviews. %SERVICEFQDN%%SERVICEPORT% will use reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local7443 as the stats name. %SERVICE% will use reviews.prod as the stats name.

Name to be used while emitting statistics for outbound clusters. By default, Istio emits statistics with the pattern outbound|||. For example outbound|8080|v2|reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local. This can be used to override that pattern.

A Pattern can be composed of various pre-defined variables. The following variables are supported. %SERVICE% - Will be substituted with name of the service. %SERVICEFQDN% - Will be substituted with FQDN of the service. %SERVICEPORT% - Will be substituted with port of the service. %SERVICEPORTNAME% - Will be substituted with port name of the service. %SUBSET_NAME% - Will be substituted with subset.

Following are some examples of supported patterns for reviews. %SERVICEFQDN%%SERVICEPORT% will use reviews.prod.svc.cluster.local7443 as the stats name. %SERVICE% will use reviews.prod as the stats name.

Configure the provision of certificates.

The set of networks inside this mesh. Each network should have a unique name and information about how to infer the endpoints in the network as well as the gateways associated with the network.

The list of endpoints in the network (obtained through the constituent service registries or from CIDR ranges). All endpoints in the network are directly accessible to one another.

Set of gateways associated with the network.

The port associated with the gateway.

The locality associated with an explicitly specified gateway (i.e. ip)

Path to the generated configuration file directory. Proxy agent generates the actual configuration and stores it in this directory.

Path to the proxy binary

Service cluster defines the name for the service_cluster that is shared by all Envoy instances. This setting corresponds to –service-cluster flag in Envoy. In a typical Envoy deployment, the service-cluster flag is used to identify the caller, for source-based routing scenarios.

Since Istio does not assign a local service/service version to each Envoy instance, the name is same for all of them. However, the source/caller’s identity (e.g., IP address) is encoded in the –service-node flag when launching Envoy. When the RDS service receives API calls from Envoy, it uses the value of the service-node flag to compute routes that are relative to the service instances located at that IP address.

The time in seconds that Envoy will drain connections during a hot restart. MUST be >=1s (e.g., 1s/1m/1h)

The time in seconds that Envoy will wait before shutting down the parent process during a hot restart. MUST be >=1s (e.g., 1s/1m/1h). MUST BE greater than drainduration_ parameter.

Address of the discovery service exposing xDS with mTLS connection.

Connection timeout used by Envoy for supporting services. (MUST BE >=1ms)

IP Address and Port of a statsd UDP listener (e.g. 10.75.241.127:9125).

Port on which Envoy should listen for administrative commands.

Authentication policy defines the global switch to control authentication for Envoy-to-Envoy communication for istio components Mixer and Pilot.

File path of custom proxy configuration, currently used by proxies in front of Mixer and Pilot.

Maximum length of name field in Envoy’s metrics. The length of the name field is determined by the length of a name field in a service and the set of labels that comprise a particular version of the service. The default value is set to 189 characters. Envoy’s internal metrics take up 67 characters, for a total of 256 character name per metric. Increase the value of this field if you find that the metrics from Envoys are truncated.

The number of worker threads to run. Default value is number of cores on the machine.

Path to the proxy bootstrap template file

The mode used to redirect inbound traffic to Envoy.

Tracing configuration to be used by the proxy.

secret discovery service(SDS) configuration to be used by the proxy.

Address of the service to which access logs from Envoys should be sent. (e.g. accesslog-service:15000). See Access Log Service for details about Envoy’s gRPC Access Log Service API.

Address of the Envoy Metrics Service implementation (e.g. metrics-service:15000). See Metric Service for details about Envoy’s Metrics Service API.

Address of a remove service used for various purposes (access log receiver, metrics receiver, etc.). Can be IP address or a fully qualified DNS name.

Use the tls_settings to specify the tls mode to use. If the remote service uses Istio mutual TLS and shares the root CA with Pilot, specify the TLS mode as ISTIO_MUTUAL.

If set then set SO_KEEPALIVE on the socket to enable TCP Keepalives.

True if SDS is enabled.

Path of k8s service account JWT path.

Address of the Datadog Agent.

Address of the LightStep Satellite pool.

The LightStep access token.

True if a secure connection should be used when communicating with the pool.

Path to the trusted cacert used to authenticate the pool.

Address of the Zipkin service (e.g. zipkin:9411).