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legacy services using Istio egress gateways</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to enable proxy protocol on AWS NLB and Istio ingress gateway (December 11, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/show-source-ip/>Proxy protocol on AWS NLB and Istio ingress gateway</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The inaugural conference for Istio will take place at the end of February (December 8, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/istiocon-2021/>Join us for the first IstioCon in 2021!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to ensure your clusters are not impacted by Docker Hub rate limiting (December 7, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/docker-rate-limit/>Handling Docker Hub rate limiting</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Workload Local DNS resolution to simplify VM integration, multicluster, and more (November 12, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/dns-proxy/>Expanding into New Frontiers - Smart DNS Proxying in Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Announcing the four newest Istio Steering Committee members (September 29, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/steering-election-results/>2020 Steering Committee Election Results</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The effect of security policies on latency of requests (September 15, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/large-scale-security-policy-performance-tests/>Large Scale Security Policy Performance Tests</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new deployment model for Istio (August 27, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/new-deployment-model/>Deploying Istio Control Planes Outside the Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The Istio Steering Committee is now in part proportionally allocated to companies based on contribution, and in part elected by community members (August 24, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/steering-changes/>Introducing the new Istio steering committee</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An alternative sidecar proxy for Istio (July 28, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/mosn-proxy/>Using MOSN with Istio: an alternative data plane</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An update on trademarks and project governance (July 8, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/open-usage/>Open and neutral: transferring our trademarks to the Open Usage Commons</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A new way to manage installation of telemetry addons (June 4, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/addon-rework/>Reworking our Addon Integrations</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describing the new functionality of Workload Entries (May 21, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/workload-entry/>Introducing Workload Entries</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Simplifying Istio upgrades by offering safe canary deployments of the control plane (May 19, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/multiple-control-planes/>Safely Upgrade Istio using a Canary Control Plane Deployment</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Application Load Balancer to direct traffic to the Istio Ingress gateway with mutual TLS (May 15, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/alb-ingress-gateway-iks/>Direct encrypted traffic from IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Ingress to Istio Ingress Gateway</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A mechanism to acquire and share an application certificate and key through mounted files (March 25, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/proxy-cert/>Provision a certificate and key for an application without sidecars</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Community partner tooling of Wasm for Istio by Solo.io (March 25, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/wasmhub-istio/>Extended and Improved WebAssemblyHub to Bring the Power of WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><span role=treeitem class=current title="Istiod consolidates the Istio control plane components into a single binary (March 19, 2020)">Introducing istiod: simplifying the control plane</span></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Wasm extensions for Envoy and Istio declaratively (March 16, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/deploy-wasm-declarative/>Declarative WebAssembly deployment for Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The future of Istio extensibility using WASM (March 5, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>Redefining extensibility in proxies - introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A vision statement and roadmap for Istio in 2020 (March 3, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/>Istio in 2020 - Following the Trade Winds</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage secrets (February 20, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/istio-agent/>Remove cross-pod unix domain sockets</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automating Istio configuration for Istio deployments (clusters) that work as a single mesh (January 5, 2020)" href=/v1.8/blog/2020/multi-cluster-mesh-automation/>Multicluster Istio configuration and service discovery using Admiral</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card1 title="Blog posts for 2019." aria-controls=card1-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2019 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card1 role=region id=card1-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card1><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="A more secure way to manage Istio webhooks (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/webhook/>Secure Webhook Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Analyze your Istio configuration to detect potential issues and get general insights (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/introducing-istioctl-analyze/>Introducing istioctl analyze</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction to Istio's new operator-based installation and control plane management feature (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/introducing-istio-operator/>Introducing the Istio Operator</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/v1beta1-authorization-policy/>Introducing the Istio v1beta1 Authorization Policy</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Getting programmatic access to Istio resources (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/announcing-istio-client-go/>Announcing Istio client-go</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provision and manage DNS certificates in Istio (November 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/dns-cert/>DNS Certificate Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configure Istio ingress gateway to act as a proxy for external services (October 15, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/proxy/>Istio as a Proxy for External Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Deploy environments that require isolation into separate meshes and enable inter-mesh communication by mesh federation (October 2, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/isolated-clusters/>Multi-Mesh Deployments for Isolation and Boundary Protection</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How can you use Istio to monitor blocked and passthrough external traffic (September 28, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/monitoring-external-service-traffic/>Monitoring Blocked and Passthrough External Service Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Demonstrates a Mixer out-of-process adapter which implements the Knative scale-from-zero logic (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/knative-activator-adapter/>Mixer Adapter for Knative</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to secure multi-cloud Kubernetes applications with zero code changes (September 18, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/app-identity-and-access-adapter/>App Identity and Access Adapter</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Taking advantage of Kubernetes trustworthy JWTs to issue certificates for workload instances more securely (September 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/trustworthy-jwt-sds/>Change in Secret Discovery Service in Istio 1.3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="The design principles behind Istio's APIs and how those APIs are evolving (August 5, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/evolving-istios-apis/>The Evolution of Istio's APIs</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Comparison of alternative solutions to control egress traffic including performance considerations (July 22, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-3/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 3</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Use Istio Egress Traffic Control to prevent attacks involving egress traffic (July 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-2/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 2</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Tools and guidance for evaluating Istio's data plane performance (July 9, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/performance-best-practices/>Best Practices: Benchmarking Service Mesh Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Learn how to extend the lifetime of Istio self-signed root certificate (June 7, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/root-transition/>Extending Istio Self-Signed Root Certificate Lifetime</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Attacks involving egress traffic and requirements for egress traffic control (May 22, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-traffic-control-in-istio-part-1/>Secure Control of Egress Traffic in Istio, part 1</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An overview of Istio 1.1 performance (March 19, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/istio1.1_perf/>Architecting Istio 1.1 for Performance</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Configuring Istio route rules in a multicluster service mesh (February 7, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/multicluster-version-routing/>Version Routing in a Multicluster Service Mesh</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Announces the new Istio blog policy (February 5, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/sail-the-blog/>Sail the Blog!</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Verifies the performance impact of adding an egress gateway (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/egress-performance/>Egress Gateway Performance Investigation</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="De-mystify how Istio manages to plugin its data-plane components into an existing deployment (January 31, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/data-plane-setup/>Demystifying Istio's Sidecar Injection Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Addressing application startup ordering and startup latency using AppSwitch (January 14, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/appswitch/>Sidestepping Dependency Ordering with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio has a new discussion board (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/announcing-discuss.istio.io/>Announcing discuss.istio.io</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to deploy a custom ingress gateway using cert-manager manually (January 10, 2019)" href=/v1.8/blog/2019/custom-ingress-gateway/>Deploy a Custom Ingress Gateway Using Cert-Manager</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card2 title="Blog posts for 2018." aria-controls=card2-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2018 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card2 role=region id=card2-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card2><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to use Istio for traffic management without deploying sidecar proxies (November 21, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/incremental-traffic-management/>Incremental Istio Part 1, Traffic Management</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (November 16, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-mongo/>Consuming External MongoDB Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio hosting an all day Twitch stream to celebrate the 1.0 release (August 3, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/istio-twitch-stream/>All Day Istio Twitch Stream</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How HP is building its next-generation footwear personalization platform on Istio (July 31, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/hp/>Istio a Game Changer for HP's FitStation Platform</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Automatic application onboarding and latency optimizations using AppSwitch (July 30, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/delayering-istio/>Delayering Istio with AppSwitch</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describe Istio's authorization feature and how to use it in various use cases (July 20, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/istio-authorization/>Micro-Segmentation with Istio Authorization</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How to export Istio Access Logs to different sinks like BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver (July 9, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/export-logs-through-stackdriver/>Exporting Logs to BigQuery, GCS, Pub/Sub through Stackdriver</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio for monitoring and access policies of HTTP egress traffic (June 22, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-monitoring-access-control/>Monitoring and Access Policies for HTTP Egress Traffic</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Introduction, motivation and design principles for the Istio v1alpha3 routing API (April 25, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/v1alpha3-routing/>Introducing the Istio v1alpha3 routing API</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes how to configure Istio ingress with a network load balancer on AWS (April 20, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/aws-nlb/>Configuring Istio Ingress with AWS NLB</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Kubernetes namespaces and RBAC to create an Istio soft multi-tenancy environment (April 19, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/soft-multitenancy/>Istio Soft Multi-Tenancy Support</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="An introduction to safer, lower-risk deployments and release to production (February 8, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/traffic-mirroring/>Traffic Mirroring with Istio for Testing in Production</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (February 6, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-tcp/>Consuming External TCP Services</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Describes a simple scenario based on Istio's Bookinfo example (January 31, 2018)" href=/v1.8/blog/2018/egress-https/>Consuming External Web Services</a></li></ul></div></div><div class=card><button class="header dynamic" id=card3 title="Blog posts for 2017." aria-controls=card3-body><svg class="icon blog"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#blog"/></svg>2017 Posts</button><div class=body aria-labelledby=card3 role=region id=card3-body><ul role=tree aria-expanded=true class=leaf-section aria-labelledby=card3><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Improving availability and reducing latency (December 7, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/mixer-spof-myth/>Mixer and the SPOF Myth</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Provides an overview of Mixer's plug-in architecture (November 3, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/adapter-model/>Mixer Adapter Model</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="How Kubernetes Network Policy relates to Istio policy (August 10, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/0.1-using-network-policy/>Using Network Policy with Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Using Istio to create autoscaled canary deployments (June 14, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/0.1-canary/>Canary Deployments using Istio</a></li><li role=none><a role=treeitem title="Istio Authentication 0.1 announcement (May 25, 2017)" href=/v1.8/blog/2017/0.1-auth/>Using Istio to Improve End-to-End Security</a></li></ul></div></div></div></nav></div><div class=article-container><button tabindex=-1 id=sidebar-toggler title="Toggle the navigation bar"><svg class="icon pull"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#pull"/></svg></button><nav aria-label=Breadcrumb><ol><li><a href=/v1.8/ title="Connect, secure, control, and observe services.">Istio</a></li><li><a href=/v1.8/blog/ title="Posts about using Istio.">Blog</a></li><li><a href=/v1.8/blog/2020/ title="Blog posts for 2020.">2020 Posts</a></li><li>Introducing istiod: simplifying the control plane</li></ol></nav><article aria-labelledby=title><div class=title-area><div style=width:100%><h1 id=title>Introducing istiod: simplifying the control plane</h1><p class=subtitle>Consolidating Istio components into ‘istiod’ simplifies mesh operability, while retaining Istio’s powerful functionality</p><p class=byline><span>By</span>
<span class=attribution>Craig Box (Google)</span><span> | </span><span><svg class="icon calendar"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#calendar"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>March 19, 2020</span><span> | </span><span title="1307 words"><svg class="icon clock"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#clock"/></svg><span>&nbsp;</span>7 minute read</span>
<span>&nbsp;</span>
<span></span></p></div></div><nav class=toc-inlined aria-label="Table of Contents"><div><hr><ol><li role=none aria-label="History of the Istio control plane"><a href=#history-of-the-istio-control-plane>History of the Istio control plane</a><li role=none aria-label="The cost of complexity"><a href=#the-cost-of-complexity>The cost of complexity</a><li role=none aria-label="The benefit of consolidation: introducing istiod"><a href=#the-benefit-of-consolidation-introducing-istiod>The benefit of consolidation: introducing istiod</a><li role=none aria-label="Extra for experts"><a href=#extra-for-experts>Extra for experts</a><li role=none aria-label="Moving forward"><a href=#moving-forward>Moving forward</a><li role=none aria-label="See also"><a href=#see-also>See also</a></li></ol><hr></div></nav><p>Microservices are a great pattern when they map services to disparate teams that deliver them, or when the value of independent rollout and the value of independent scale are greater than the cost of orchestration. We regularly talk to customers and teams running Istio in the real world, and they told us that none of these were the case for the Istio control plane. So, in Istio 1.5, we&rsquo;ve changed how Istio is packaged, consolidating the control plane functionality into a single binary called <strong>istiod</strong>.</p><h2 id=history-of-the-istio-control-plane>History of the Istio control plane</h2><p>Istio implements a pattern that has been in use at both Google and IBM for many years, which later became known as &ldquo;service mesh&rdquo;. By pairing client and server processes with proxy servers, they act as an application-aware <em>data plane</em> that’s not simply moving packets around hosts, or pulses over wires.</p><p>This pattern helps the world come to terms with <em>microservices</em>: fine-grained, loosely-coupled services connected via lightweight protocols. The common cross-platform and cross-language standards like HTTP and gRPC that replace proprietary transports, and the widespread presence of the needed libraries, empower different teams to write different parts of an overall architecture in whatever language makes the most sense. Furthermore, each service can scale independently as needed. A desire to implement security, observability and traffic control for such a network powers Istio’s popularity.</p><p>Istio&rsquo;s <em>control plane</em> is, itself, a modern, cloud-native application. Thus, it was built from the start as a set of microservices. Individual Istio components like service discovery (Pilot), configuration (Galley), certificate generation (Citadel) and extensibility (Mixer) were all written and deployed as separate microservices. The need for these components to communicate securely and be observable, provided opportunities for Istio to eat its own dogfood (or &ldquo;drink its own champagne&rdquo;, to use a more French version of the metaphor!).</p><h2 id=the-cost-of-complexity>The cost of complexity</h2><p>Good teams look back upon their choices and, with the benefit of hindsight, revisit them. Generally, when a team adopts microservices and their inherent complexity, they look for improvements in other areas to justify the tradeoffs. Let&rsquo;s look at the Istio control plane through that lens.</p><ul><li><p><strong>Microservices empower you to write in different languages.</strong> The data plane (the Envoy proxy) is written in C++, and this boundary benefits from a clean separation in terms of the xDS APIs. However, all of the Istio control plane components are written in Go. We were able to choose the appropriate language for the appropriate job: highly performant C++ for the proxy, but accessible and speedy-development for everything else.</p></li><li><p><strong>Microservices empower you to allow different teams to manage services individually.</strong>. In the vast majority of Istio installations, all the components are installed and operated by a single team or individual. The componentization done within Istio is aligned along the boundaries of the development teams who build it. This would make sense if the Istio components were delivered as a managed service by the people who wrote them, but this is not the case! Making life simpler for the development teams had an outsized impact of the usability for the orders-of-magnitude more users.</p></li><li><p><strong>Microservices empower you to decouple versions, and release different components at different times.</strong> All the components of the control plane have always been released at the same version, at the same time. We have never tested or supported running different versions of (for example) Citadel and Pilot.</p></li><li><p><strong>Microservices empower you to scale components independently.</strong> In Istio 1.5, control plane costs are dominated by a single feature: serving the Envoy xDS APIs that program the data plane. Every other feature has a marginal cost, which means there is very little value to having those features in separately-scalable microservices.</p></li><li><p><strong>Microservices empower you to maintain security boundaries.</strong> Another good reason to separate an application into different microservices is if they have different security roles. Multiple Istio microservices like the sidecar injector, the Envoy bootstrap, Citadel, and Pilot hold nearly equivalent permissions to change the proxy configuration. Therefore, exploiting any of these services would cause near equivalent damage. When you deploy Istio, all the components are installed by default into the same Kubernetes namespace, offering limited security isolation.</p></li></ul><h2 id=the-benefit-of-consolidation-introducing-istiod>The benefit of consolidation: introducing istiod</h2><p>Having established that many of the common benefits of microservices didn&rsquo;t apply to the Istio control plane, we decided to unify them into a single binary: <strong>istiod</strong> (the &rsquo;d&rsquo; is for <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_%28computing%29>daemon</a>).</p><p>Let&rsquo;s look at the benefits of the new packaging:</p><ul><li><p><strong>Installation becomes easier.</strong> Fewer Kubernetes deployments and associated configurations are required, so the set of configuration options and flags for Istio is reduced significantly. In the simplest case, <strong><em>you can start the Istio control plane, with all features enabled, by starting a single Pod.</em></strong></p></li><li><p><strong>Configuration becomes easier.</strong> Many of the configuration options that Istio has today are ways to orchestrate the control plane components, and so are no longer needed. You also no longer need to change cluster-wide <code>PodSecurityPolicy</code> to deploy Istio.</p></li><li><p><strong>Using VMs becomes easier.</strong> To add a workload to a mesh, you now just need to install one agent and the generated certificates. That agent connects back to only a single service.</p></li><li><p><strong>Maintenance becomes easier.</strong> Installing, upgrading, and removing Istio no longer require a complicated dance of version dependencies and startup orders. For example: To upgrade, you only need to start a new istiod version alongside your existing control plane, canary it, and then move all traffic over to it.</p></li><li><p><strong>Scalability becomes easier.</strong> There is now only one component to scale.</p></li><li><p><strong>Debugging becomes easier.</strong> Fewer components means less cross-component environmental debugging.</p></li><li><p><strong>Startup time goes down.</strong> Components no longer need to wait for each other to start in a defined order.</p></li><li><p><strong>Resource usage goes down and responsiveness goes up.</strong> Communication between components becomes guaranteed, and not subject to gRPC size limits. Caches can be shared safely, which decreases the resource footprint as a result.</p></li></ul><p>istiod unifies functionality that Pilot, Galley, Citadel and the sidecar injector previously performed, into a single binary.</p><p>A separate component, the istio-agent, helps each sidecar connect to the mesh by securely passing configuration and secrets to the Envoy proxies. While the agent, strictly speaking, is still part of the control plane, it runs on a per-pod basis. We’ve further simplified by rolling per-node functionality that used to run as a DaemonSet, into that per-pod agent.</p><h2 id=extra-for-experts>Extra for experts</h2><p>There will still be some cases where you might want to run Istio components independently, or replace certain components.</p><p>Some users might want to use a Certificate Authority (CA) outside the mesh, and we have <a href=/v1.8/docs/tasks/security/cert-management/plugin-ca-cert/>documentation on how to do that</a>. If you do your certificate provisioning using a different tool, we can use that instead of the built-in CA.</p><h2 id=moving-forward>Moving forward</h2><p>At its heart, istiod is just a packaging and optimization change. It&rsquo;s built on the same code and API contracts as the separate components, and remains covered by our comprehensive test suite. This gives us confidence in making it the default in Istio 1.5. The service is now called <code>istiod</code> - you’ll see an <code>istio-pilot</code> for existing proxies as the upgrade process completes.</p><p>While the move to istiod may seem like a big change, and is a huge improvement for the people who <em>administer</em> and <em>maintain</em> the mesh, it won’t make the day-to-day life of <em>using</em> Istio any different. istiod is not changing any of the APIs used to configure your mesh, so your existing processes will all stay the same.</p><p>Does this change imply that microservice are a mistake for <em>all</em> workloads and architectures? Of course not. They are a tool in a toolbelt, and they work best when they are reflected in your organizational reality. Instead, this change shows a willingness in the project to change based on user feedback, and a continued focus on simplification for all users. Microservices have to be right sized, and we believe we have found the right size for Istio.</p><nav id=see-also><h2>See also</h2><div class=see-also><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/new-deployment-model/>Deploying Istio Control Planes Outside the Mesh</a></p><p class=desc>A new deployment model for Istio.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/multiple-control-planes/>Safely Upgrade Istio using a Canary Control Plane Deployment</a></p><p class=desc>Simplifying Istio upgrades by offering safe canary deployments of the control plane.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/wasmhub-istio/>Extended and Improved WebAssemblyHub to Bring the Power of WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></p><p class=desc>Community partner tooling of Wasm for Istio by Solo.io.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/deploy-wasm-declarative/>Declarative WebAssembly deployment for Istio</a></p><p class=desc>Configuring Wasm extensions for Envoy and Istio declaratively.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>Redefining extensibility in proxies - introducing WebAssembly to Envoy and Istio</a></p><p class=desc>The future of Istio extensibility using WASM.</p></div><div class=entry><p class=link><a data-skipendnotes=true href=/v1.8/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/>Istio in 2020 - Following the Trade Winds</a></p><p class=desc>A vision statement and roadmap for Istio in 2020.</p></div></div></nav></article><nav class=pagenav><div class=left><a title="A mechanism to acquire and share an application certificate and key through mounted files." href=/v1.8/blog/2020/proxy-cert/><svg class="icon left-arrow"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#left-arrow"/></svg>Provision a certificate and key for an application without sidecars</a></div><div class=right><a title="Configuring Wasm extensions for Envoy and Istio declaratively." href=/v1.8/blog/2020/deploy-wasm-declarative/>Declarative WebAssembly deployment for Istio<svg class="icon right-arrow"><use xlink:href="/v1.8/img/icons.svg#right-arrow"/></svg></a></div></nav><div id=feedback><div id=feedback-initial>Was this information useful?<br><button class="btn feedback" onclick="sendFeedback('en',1)">Yes</button>
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