10 Fine-tuning the control plane performance

Up to now, we introduced a variety of Istio’s capabilities such as resiliency, observability, security, access control and how those are enabled by the service proxy. Then in the previous chapter on troubleshooting the data plane, we took a deep dive into the debugging tools with the goal to understand how service proxies are configured. Understanding service proxy configuration simplifies troubleshooting when some behaviors are not matching our expectations.

In this chapter we pull back the focus to the control plane, we’ll investigate how it configures the service proxies, what are the factors that slow down this process, how to monitor it, and what are the knobs that we can turn to improve its performance.

10.1 The control plane’s primary goal

10.1.1 Understanding the steps of data plane synchronization

10.1.2 Factors that determine the performance

10.2 Monitoring the Control Plane

10.2.1 The four golden signals of the control plane

10.3 Tuning the performance

10.3.1 Setting up the workspace

10.3.2 Measuring the performance prior to optimizations

10.3.3 Event batching and push throttling properties

10.4 Performance tuning guidelines

10.5 Summary