11 Performance tuning the control plane

We have covered a lot of Istio’s capabilities up to this chapter. We coverd functionality such as resiliency, observability, security, access control and how those are enabled by the service proxy.

In the previous chapter on troubleshooting the data plane, we took a deep dive into the debugging tools available for us to diagnose issues with proxy configuration and proxy behavior. Understanding service proxy configuration simplifies troubleshooting when some behaviors do not matching our expectations.

In this chapter, we focus on the some techniques to troubleshoot the control plane components. We’ll investigate how the control plane 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.

11.1 The control plane’s primary goal

11.1.1 Understanding the steps of data plane synchronization

11.1.2 Factors that determine the performance

11.2 Monitoring the Control Plane

11.2.1 The four golden signals of the control plane

11.3 Tuning the performance

11.3.1 Setting up the workspace

11.3.2 Measuring the performance prior to optimizations

11.3.3 Event batching and push throttling properties

11.4 Performance tuning guidelines

11.5 Summary