This section provides options for piecemeal installation of Istio components.
It is possible to use Istio as an Ingress controller, leveraging advanced L7 routing capabilities such as version-aware routing, header based routing, gRPC/HTTP2 proxying, tracing, etc. Deploy Istio Pilot only and disable other components. Do not deploy the Istio initializer.
By deploying Istio Pilot and Mixer, the Ingress controller configuration described above can be enhanced to provide in-depth telemetry and policy enforcement capabilities such as rate limits, access controls, etc.
If you wish to take advantage of Istio’s L7 traffic management capabilities, in addition to obtaining in-depth telemetry and performing distributed request tracing, deploy Istio Pilot and Mixer. In addition, disable policy enforcement at the Mixer.