Istio Certified Associate (ICA) Boot Camp with Exam immerses technology professionals in the Istio service mesh across two intensive, hands-on days. Attendees leave with a clear understanding of how Istio delivers a powerful, resilient, integrated Kubernetes service mesh. Students configure a complete Istio environment on their own Kubernetes lab system, gaining hands-on practice throughout. The course covers key facets of Istio, including traffic management, observability, Envoy, ambient mesh, and policy enforcement. By the end, attendees have the skills and knowledge needed to work with Istio and design practical service-mesh-based solutions for real-world problems.
Early labs stand up a standalone Envoy proxy, working directly with its static and dynamic configuration. Attendees then install Istio itself and explore the Operator and Istio CRDs. Attendees then configure Sidecar mode traffic control and security policies. They also work with Ambient mode, using ztunnels and Waypoint proxies instead of injected sidecars.
Day two opens with ingress and gateway configuration, contrasting Istio’s gateway CRD and VirtualServices with native Kubernetes ingress, then defining ServiceEntry and DestinationRule resources. Traffic management labs apply splitting, weighting, locality-aware routing, and request mirroring. Tracing exercises then bring in Kiali and OpenTelemetry, along with fault injection and circuit breakers for troubleshooting practice. The course closes with multicluster and non-Kubernetes workload integration, examining mesh federation and VM integration. It also covers the mTLS considerations that come with extending a mesh beyond a single cluster.
Who Should Attend
SREs, Architects, Developers, QA Staff, Technical Managers, Dev/ML/AI/Platform Ops and IT personnel
What Attendees Will Learn
Upon completing Istio Certified Associate (ICA) Boot Camp with Exam, attendees will be able to:
- Explain the Envoy proxy and its traffic control and security features
- Explain Istio architecture and contrast Ambient and Sidecar modes
- Install Istio on Kubernetes and work with istioctl
- Configure Istio Sidecar mode traffic control and security
- Configure Istio Ambient mode, including ztunnels and Waypoint proxies
- Configure Istio Ingress and Gateway resources
- Apply Istio traffic management, tracing, and troubleshooting
- Configure Istio multicluster and non-Kubernetes workload integration
Prerequisites
Students should take “Container Foundation” and “Kubernetes Foundation” courses or have equivalent knowledge prior to taking this class.