Installation Configuration Profiles

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:

1. 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 setting by running the command istioctl profile dump.

2. 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.

3. minimal: the minimal set of components necessary to use Istio’s traffic management features.

4. remote: used for configuring remote clusters of a multicluster mesh.

5. empty: deploys nothing. This can be useful as a base profile for custom configuration.

6. 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.

The components marked as X are installed within each profile:

To further customize Istio and install addons, you can add one or more --set <key>=<value> options in the istioctl install command that you use when installing Istio. Refer to integration for more details.