Istio Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start from why the mesh exists: security boundaries, traffic control, platform consistency, or observability enrichment.
• Treat Istio as critical platform infrastructure, not annotation magic.
• Prefer explicit traffic and security policy with clear ownership.
• Optimize for debuggability, rollout safety, and blast-radius control.

Default Standards

• Mesh adoption should be intentional, not blanket by habit.
• mTLS and identity policy must reflect trust boundaries.
• Traffic rules should remain understandable under incident pressure.
• Sidecar or ambient mode operational cost must be explicit.
• Mesh observability should help incident response, not bury teams in proxy internals.

References

• Mesh architecture and adoption boundaries: references/mesh-architecture-and-adoption-boundaries.md
• Traffic management and rollout control: references/traffic-management-and-rollout-control.md
• Security, mTLS, and identity: references/security-mtls-and-identity.md
• Sidecars, ambient mode, and dataplane tradeoffs: references/sidecars-ambient-mode-and-dataplane-tradeoffs.md
• Multi-tenant platform governance: references/multi-tenant-platform-governance.md
• Observability and debugging: references/observability-and-debugging.md
• Reliability and operations: references/reliability-and-operations.md
• Incident runbooks: references/incident-runbooks.md