Mastering Service Mesh Architecture for Cloud-Native Systems
Course Format & Delivery Details Flexible, On-Demand Learning Designed for Real Professionals
This is a self-paced, comprehensive learning experience with immediate online access, allowing you to begin exactly when it suits your schedule. There are no fixed start dates, no time zones to consider, and no pressure to keep up with live sessions. You control the pace, the timing, and the depth of your learning journey. Real Results in Real Time
Most learners report applying core concepts successfully within days. The typical completion time is 6 to 8 weeks when studying part-time, but many professionals finish in just 3 to 4 weeks due to the highly structured, outcome-focused content. From the very first module, you’ll gain insights and practices you can implement immediately in your current work environment, delivering measurable value while you learn. Lifetime Access, Zero Obsolescence
Enroll once and gain permanent access to all course materials, including every future update at no additional cost. Service mesh technology evolves rapidly, and this course is continuously refined to reflect the latest best practices, security enhancements, and architectural innovations. You’re not buying a static product - you’re gaining lifelong access to a living, growing resource. Learn Anywhere, Anytime, on Any Device
The course platform is fully mobile-friendly and optimized for seamless use across devices - whether you're reviewing concepts on your tablet during travel or practicing configuration on your desktop at work. With 24/7 global access, your progress syncs automatically, so you can pick up wherever you left off. Dedicated Instructor Support and Expert Guidance
You’re never alone. This course includes direct access to experienced instructors who specialize in service mesh deployment and cloud-native infrastructure. Ask technical questions, clarify complex scenarios, and receive detailed feedback. Support is integrated directly into the learning environment, ensuring help is available exactly when you need it. Industry-Recognized Certification of Completion
Upon finishing the course, you will earn a Certificate of Completion issued by The Art of Service. This credential is globally recognised and signals deep technical mastery, architectural fluency, and hands-on competence in service mesh systems. Employers and peers alike trust The Art of Service for delivering elite, practitioner-led training. This certification enhances your credibility, strengthens your professional profile, and supports career advancement - from promotion to consulting opportunities. Transparent, No-Nonsense Pricing
The price listed includes everything. There are no hidden fees, recurring charges, or surprise costs. What you see is exactly what you get - full access, lifetime updates, certification, and instructor support, all in one straightforward package. Trusted Payment Methods
We accept all major payment options, including Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, ensuring a secure and convenient enrollment process for professionals worldwide. Zero-Risk Enrollment with Full Money-Back Guarantee
We stand completely behind the value of this course. If you're not satisfied with the content, depth, or practical application, simply request a full refund within 30 days. No questions asked. This is our promise - you take no risk, but gain everything by taking the first step. Instant Confirmation, Seamless Access
After enrollment, you’ll receive an automated confirmation email. Your detailed access instructions and login credentials will be delivered separately once your course materials are fully prepared. This ensures your learning environment is ready, tested, and optimised before your first session. “Will This Work For Me?” - We Know the Doubt
You might be wondering: “I’m not a Kubernetes expert. Will this still be useful?” “I work in a legacy environment - can I apply these principles?” “What if I don’t have time to study full-time?” Here’s the truth: This course is built for real practitioners in complex environments. Whether you're a platform engineer in a multinational enterprise, a DevOps lead scaling microservices, or a cloud architect modernising legacy systems, the content is designed to meet you where you are. - If you're a Site Reliability Engineer, you’ll learn to automate traffic resilience, manage fault injection, and enforce canary rollouts with precision.
- If you're a Cloud Architect, you’ll gain the structured methodology to design secure, observable, and scalable service mesh topologies.
- If you're a DevOps Lead, you’ll master cross-team service ownership, reduce deployment risks, and strengthen CI/CD pipelines with service mesh integration.
This works even if: you’re new to service meshes, working under tight deadlines, managing mixed technology stacks, or lack full organisational buy-in. The course provides incremental adoption strategies, pilot project templates, and stakeholder communication frameworks that make implementation possible - even in challenging environments. Don’t take our word for it: “I was skeptical at first. My team uses a hybrid architecture with legacy monoliths and modern microservices. I didn’t think a service mesh would be relevant. In just three weeks, I designed and implemented a lightweight Istio setup that reduced inter-service outages by 67%. This course changed how we think about reliability.”
- Daniel R., Senior Platform Engineer, Financial Services, Frankfurt
“The hands-on labs and configuration blueprints were game-changing. I went from reading documentation to leading a mesh rollout across three clusters. The certification helped me secure a promotion within two months.”
- Meera T., Cloud Architect, SaaS Provider, Bengaluru
We reverse the risk so you can move forward with confidence. Lifetime access, real-world application, expert support, and a trusted certification - all structured to maximise your return on time, effort, and investment. This isn’t just learning. This is career transformation.
Extensive and Detailed Course Curriculum
Module 1: Foundations of Cloud-Native Architecture - Understanding the evolution from monolithic to cloud-native systems
- Key challenges in distributed systems and microservice communication
- Introduction to Kubernetes and container orchestration principles
- Service discovery mechanisms in dynamic environments
- API gateways vs service meshes - when to use each
- Observability challenges in fragmented cloud environments
- The role of sidecars in modern infrastructure
- Security gaps in default Kubernetes networking
- Decoupling business logic from network logic
- Defining service ownership and team autonomy
- Common anti-patterns in microservice communication
- Introduction to declarative configuration
- Understanding control plane and data plane separation
- Introduction to mutual TLS in zero-trust networks
- Basics of traffic routing and load balancing
Module 2: Introduction to Service Mesh Concepts - Defining the service mesh - architecture and core purpose
- How service meshes solve observability, security, and reliability issues
- Sidecar proxy architecture and lifecycle management
- Service mesh layers - policy, control, telemetry, and security
- Understanding east-west versus north-south traffic
- Benefits of abstraction in infrastructure networking
- Service identity and authentication in distributed systems
- Canary deployments and A/B testing at scale
- Rate limiting and traffic shaping for stability
- Circuit breaking patterns for fault tolerance
- Request retries and timeout policies
- Service mesh as a platform for SRE practices
- Standardisation of communication across teams
- Operational overhead and how to manage it
- Evaluating organisational readiness for service mesh adoption
Module 3: Comparing Major Service Mesh Technologies - Istio architecture and component breakdown
- Linkerd’s lightweight approach and Rust-based proxy
- Consul Connect - integrating with multi-cloud and hybrid setups
- OpenShift Service Mesh and vendor-specific integrations
- Comparison of control plane complexity
- Data plane performance benchmarks across proxies
- Operational maturity and community support
- Security model differences - mTLS, RBAC, and authorization
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines
- Extensibility through web assembly (Wasm)
- Licensing considerations and enterprise support costs
- Traffic management capabilities in each platform
- Multi-cluster and multi-region support
- Service mesh gateways and ingress integration
- Making the decision: Istio vs Linkerd vs Consul
Module 4: Istio Deep Dive - Installation and Configuration - Istio control plane components - Citadel, Pilot, Galley, Mixer
- Installing Istio using Istioctl and Helm
- Profile-based installation - demo, default, minimal, and remote
- Verifying Istio installation and component health
- Configuring Istio with tolerations and affinity rules
- Namespace-level injection of sidecar proxies
- Manual vs automatic sidecar injection
- Setting up the Istio ingress gateway
- Configuring egress gateways for external traffic
- Securing control plane communication
- Resource requirements and tuning for production
- Cluster preparation - RBAC, CRDs, and CRIs
- Integrating with external identity providers
- Setting up mutual TLS across namespaces
- Using revisions for Istio upgrades and canaries
Module 5: Traffic Management with Istio - Gateways and virtual services - routing external traffic
- Destination rules and load balancing policies
- Creating weighted traffic splits for gradual rollouts
- Implementing canary deployments with Istio
- Header-based routing and A/B testing scenarios
- Timeouts and retry policies at the service level
- Circuit breaking with connection pools and outlier detection
- Failover policies across multiple clusters
- Configuring fault injection for resilience testing
- Mirroring traffic to staging environments
- Routing to multiple versions using subsets
- Rate limiting with Envoy filters
- Traffic policies for backup and disaster recovery
- Managing traffic across Kubernetes namespaces
- Using wildcards and regular expressions in routing rules
Module 6: Security and Identity in Service Mesh - Zero-trust networking principles in practice
- Automatic mTLS between sidecar proxies
- Configuring strict versus permissive mTLS modes
- Workload identity and service account binding
- X.509 certificate lifecycle management
- Integrating with external CA systems
- Role-based access control (RBAC) in Istio
- Authorization policies for service-to-service calls
- Securing service mesh control plane endpoints
- Preventing lateral movement in case of compromise
- Secure egress traffic with service entries
- Defining secure communication between clusters
- Best practices for secret management
- Using SELinux and AppArmor with sidecar containers
- Hardening Istio components against common exploits
Module 7: Observability and Telemetry Systems - Understanding Envoy proxy access logs and metrics
- Configuring Prometheus for Istio metric collection
- Setting up Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring
- Tracing distributed requests with Jaeger and Zipkin
- Creating custom dashboards for SLO tracking
- Request latency distribution and percentile analysis
- Monitoring service-to-service error rates
- Using Kiali for visualising service mesh topology
- Identifying traffic anomalies and misconfigurations
- Correlating logs, metrics, and traces (the three pillars)
- Integrating with existing logging pipelines (Fluentd, Logstash)
- Defining alerting rules based on mesh telemetry
- Service level objective (SLO) tracking with Istio metrics
- Monitoring control plane performance and health
- Creating operational runbooks from telemetry data
Module 8: Service Mesh Policy and Governance - Creating standardised service mesh policies across teams
- Enforcing secure defaults through config templates
- Policy as code - versioning and managing Istio configurations
- Using GitOps workflows for service mesh management
- Centralised versus decentralised control strategies
- Defining governance boundaries for development teams
- Automating policy validation with CI checks
- Service mesh quotas and resource allocation
- Managing mesh-wide defaults and overrides
- Implementing namespace-level isolation policies
- Compliance monitoring and audit trail generation
- Handling configuration drift and reconciliation
- Using OPA (Open Policy Agent) with Istio extensions
- Standardising naming, labels, and annotations
- Creating templates for common deployment patterns
Module 9: Multi-Cluster and Hybrid Deployments - Understanding multi-cluster topologies - primary-remote, primary-primary
- Setting up multicluster communication with Istio
- Shared control plane vs split control plane architectures
- Configuring cluster mesh with east-west gateways
- Cross-cluster service discovery mechanisms
- Routing traffic across regions and clouds
- Failover and disaster recovery across clusters
- Latency-aware routing and proximity detection
- Security model for cross-cluster mTLS
- Managing identity across clusters
- Unified observability across a cluster mesh
- Bandwidth and cost considerations in multi-cluster
- Implementing cluster-specific policies
- Using Kubernetes Federation with service mesh
- Hybrid cloud - integrating on-prem with cloud clusters
Module 10: Advanced Configuration and Extensibility - Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Daniel R., Senior Platform Engineer, Financial Services, Frankfurt
- Meera T., Cloud Architect, SaaS Provider, Bengaluru
Module 1: Foundations of Cloud-Native Architecture - Understanding the evolution from monolithic to cloud-native systems
- Key challenges in distributed systems and microservice communication
- Introduction to Kubernetes and container orchestration principles
- Service discovery mechanisms in dynamic environments
- API gateways vs service meshes - when to use each
- Observability challenges in fragmented cloud environments
- The role of sidecars in modern infrastructure
- Security gaps in default Kubernetes networking
- Decoupling business logic from network logic
- Defining service ownership and team autonomy
- Common anti-patterns in microservice communication
- Introduction to declarative configuration
- Understanding control plane and data plane separation
- Introduction to mutual TLS in zero-trust networks
- Basics of traffic routing and load balancing
Module 2: Introduction to Service Mesh Concepts - Defining the service mesh - architecture and core purpose
- How service meshes solve observability, security, and reliability issues
- Sidecar proxy architecture and lifecycle management
- Service mesh layers - policy, control, telemetry, and security
- Understanding east-west versus north-south traffic
- Benefits of abstraction in infrastructure networking
- Service identity and authentication in distributed systems
- Canary deployments and A/B testing at scale
- Rate limiting and traffic shaping for stability
- Circuit breaking patterns for fault tolerance
- Request retries and timeout policies
- Service mesh as a platform for SRE practices
- Standardisation of communication across teams
- Operational overhead and how to manage it
- Evaluating organisational readiness for service mesh adoption
Module 3: Comparing Major Service Mesh Technologies - Istio architecture and component breakdown
- Linkerd’s lightweight approach and Rust-based proxy
- Consul Connect - integrating with multi-cloud and hybrid setups
- OpenShift Service Mesh and vendor-specific integrations
- Comparison of control plane complexity
- Data plane performance benchmarks across proxies
- Operational maturity and community support
- Security model differences - mTLS, RBAC, and authorization
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines
- Extensibility through web assembly (Wasm)
- Licensing considerations and enterprise support costs
- Traffic management capabilities in each platform
- Multi-cluster and multi-region support
- Service mesh gateways and ingress integration
- Making the decision: Istio vs Linkerd vs Consul
Module 4: Istio Deep Dive - Installation and Configuration - Istio control plane components - Citadel, Pilot, Galley, Mixer
- Installing Istio using Istioctl and Helm
- Profile-based installation - demo, default, minimal, and remote
- Verifying Istio installation and component health
- Configuring Istio with tolerations and affinity rules
- Namespace-level injection of sidecar proxies
- Manual vs automatic sidecar injection
- Setting up the Istio ingress gateway
- Configuring egress gateways for external traffic
- Securing control plane communication
- Resource requirements and tuning for production
- Cluster preparation - RBAC, CRDs, and CRIs
- Integrating with external identity providers
- Setting up mutual TLS across namespaces
- Using revisions for Istio upgrades and canaries
Module 5: Traffic Management with Istio - Gateways and virtual services - routing external traffic
- Destination rules and load balancing policies
- Creating weighted traffic splits for gradual rollouts
- Implementing canary deployments with Istio
- Header-based routing and A/B testing scenarios
- Timeouts and retry policies at the service level
- Circuit breaking with connection pools and outlier detection
- Failover policies across multiple clusters
- Configuring fault injection for resilience testing
- Mirroring traffic to staging environments
- Routing to multiple versions using subsets
- Rate limiting with Envoy filters
- Traffic policies for backup and disaster recovery
- Managing traffic across Kubernetes namespaces
- Using wildcards and regular expressions in routing rules
Module 6: Security and Identity in Service Mesh - Zero-trust networking principles in practice
- Automatic mTLS between sidecar proxies
- Configuring strict versus permissive mTLS modes
- Workload identity and service account binding
- X.509 certificate lifecycle management
- Integrating with external CA systems
- Role-based access control (RBAC) in Istio
- Authorization policies for service-to-service calls
- Securing service mesh control plane endpoints
- Preventing lateral movement in case of compromise
- Secure egress traffic with service entries
- Defining secure communication between clusters
- Best practices for secret management
- Using SELinux and AppArmor with sidecar containers
- Hardening Istio components against common exploits
Module 7: Observability and Telemetry Systems - Understanding Envoy proxy access logs and metrics
- Configuring Prometheus for Istio metric collection
- Setting up Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring
- Tracing distributed requests with Jaeger and Zipkin
- Creating custom dashboards for SLO tracking
- Request latency distribution and percentile analysis
- Monitoring service-to-service error rates
- Using Kiali for visualising service mesh topology
- Identifying traffic anomalies and misconfigurations
- Correlating logs, metrics, and traces (the three pillars)
- Integrating with existing logging pipelines (Fluentd, Logstash)
- Defining alerting rules based on mesh telemetry
- Service level objective (SLO) tracking with Istio metrics
- Monitoring control plane performance and health
- Creating operational runbooks from telemetry data
Module 8: Service Mesh Policy and Governance - Creating standardised service mesh policies across teams
- Enforcing secure defaults through config templates
- Policy as code - versioning and managing Istio configurations
- Using GitOps workflows for service mesh management
- Centralised versus decentralised control strategies
- Defining governance boundaries for development teams
- Automating policy validation with CI checks
- Service mesh quotas and resource allocation
- Managing mesh-wide defaults and overrides
- Implementing namespace-level isolation policies
- Compliance monitoring and audit trail generation
- Handling configuration drift and reconciliation
- Using OPA (Open Policy Agent) with Istio extensions
- Standardising naming, labels, and annotations
- Creating templates for common deployment patterns
Module 9: Multi-Cluster and Hybrid Deployments - Understanding multi-cluster topologies - primary-remote, primary-primary
- Setting up multicluster communication with Istio
- Shared control plane vs split control plane architectures
- Configuring cluster mesh with east-west gateways
- Cross-cluster service discovery mechanisms
- Routing traffic across regions and clouds
- Failover and disaster recovery across clusters
- Latency-aware routing and proximity detection
- Security model for cross-cluster mTLS
- Managing identity across clusters
- Unified observability across a cluster mesh
- Bandwidth and cost considerations in multi-cluster
- Implementing cluster-specific policies
- Using Kubernetes Federation with service mesh
- Hybrid cloud - integrating on-prem with cloud clusters
Module 10: Advanced Configuration and Extensibility - Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Defining the service mesh - architecture and core purpose
- How service meshes solve observability, security, and reliability issues
- Sidecar proxy architecture and lifecycle management
- Service mesh layers - policy, control, telemetry, and security
- Understanding east-west versus north-south traffic
- Benefits of abstraction in infrastructure networking
- Service identity and authentication in distributed systems
- Canary deployments and A/B testing at scale
- Rate limiting and traffic shaping for stability
- Circuit breaking patterns for fault tolerance
- Request retries and timeout policies
- Service mesh as a platform for SRE practices
- Standardisation of communication across teams
- Operational overhead and how to manage it
- Evaluating organisational readiness for service mesh adoption
Module 3: Comparing Major Service Mesh Technologies - Istio architecture and component breakdown
- Linkerd’s lightweight approach and Rust-based proxy
- Consul Connect - integrating with multi-cloud and hybrid setups
- OpenShift Service Mesh and vendor-specific integrations
- Comparison of control plane complexity
- Data plane performance benchmarks across proxies
- Operational maturity and community support
- Security model differences - mTLS, RBAC, and authorization
- Integration with CI/CD pipelines
- Extensibility through web assembly (Wasm)
- Licensing considerations and enterprise support costs
- Traffic management capabilities in each platform
- Multi-cluster and multi-region support
- Service mesh gateways and ingress integration
- Making the decision: Istio vs Linkerd vs Consul
Module 4: Istio Deep Dive - Installation and Configuration - Istio control plane components - Citadel, Pilot, Galley, Mixer
- Installing Istio using Istioctl and Helm
- Profile-based installation - demo, default, minimal, and remote
- Verifying Istio installation and component health
- Configuring Istio with tolerations and affinity rules
- Namespace-level injection of sidecar proxies
- Manual vs automatic sidecar injection
- Setting up the Istio ingress gateway
- Configuring egress gateways for external traffic
- Securing control plane communication
- Resource requirements and tuning for production
- Cluster preparation - RBAC, CRDs, and CRIs
- Integrating with external identity providers
- Setting up mutual TLS across namespaces
- Using revisions for Istio upgrades and canaries
Module 5: Traffic Management with Istio - Gateways and virtual services - routing external traffic
- Destination rules and load balancing policies
- Creating weighted traffic splits for gradual rollouts
- Implementing canary deployments with Istio
- Header-based routing and A/B testing scenarios
- Timeouts and retry policies at the service level
- Circuit breaking with connection pools and outlier detection
- Failover policies across multiple clusters
- Configuring fault injection for resilience testing
- Mirroring traffic to staging environments
- Routing to multiple versions using subsets
- Rate limiting with Envoy filters
- Traffic policies for backup and disaster recovery
- Managing traffic across Kubernetes namespaces
- Using wildcards and regular expressions in routing rules
Module 6: Security and Identity in Service Mesh - Zero-trust networking principles in practice
- Automatic mTLS between sidecar proxies
- Configuring strict versus permissive mTLS modes
- Workload identity and service account binding
- X.509 certificate lifecycle management
- Integrating with external CA systems
- Role-based access control (RBAC) in Istio
- Authorization policies for service-to-service calls
- Securing service mesh control plane endpoints
- Preventing lateral movement in case of compromise
- Secure egress traffic with service entries
- Defining secure communication between clusters
- Best practices for secret management
- Using SELinux and AppArmor with sidecar containers
- Hardening Istio components against common exploits
Module 7: Observability and Telemetry Systems - Understanding Envoy proxy access logs and metrics
- Configuring Prometheus for Istio metric collection
- Setting up Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring
- Tracing distributed requests with Jaeger and Zipkin
- Creating custom dashboards for SLO tracking
- Request latency distribution and percentile analysis
- Monitoring service-to-service error rates
- Using Kiali for visualising service mesh topology
- Identifying traffic anomalies and misconfigurations
- Correlating logs, metrics, and traces (the three pillars)
- Integrating with existing logging pipelines (Fluentd, Logstash)
- Defining alerting rules based on mesh telemetry
- Service level objective (SLO) tracking with Istio metrics
- Monitoring control plane performance and health
- Creating operational runbooks from telemetry data
Module 8: Service Mesh Policy and Governance - Creating standardised service mesh policies across teams
- Enforcing secure defaults through config templates
- Policy as code - versioning and managing Istio configurations
- Using GitOps workflows for service mesh management
- Centralised versus decentralised control strategies
- Defining governance boundaries for development teams
- Automating policy validation with CI checks
- Service mesh quotas and resource allocation
- Managing mesh-wide defaults and overrides
- Implementing namespace-level isolation policies
- Compliance monitoring and audit trail generation
- Handling configuration drift and reconciliation
- Using OPA (Open Policy Agent) with Istio extensions
- Standardising naming, labels, and annotations
- Creating templates for common deployment patterns
Module 9: Multi-Cluster and Hybrid Deployments - Understanding multi-cluster topologies - primary-remote, primary-primary
- Setting up multicluster communication with Istio
- Shared control plane vs split control plane architectures
- Configuring cluster mesh with east-west gateways
- Cross-cluster service discovery mechanisms
- Routing traffic across regions and clouds
- Failover and disaster recovery across clusters
- Latency-aware routing and proximity detection
- Security model for cross-cluster mTLS
- Managing identity across clusters
- Unified observability across a cluster mesh
- Bandwidth and cost considerations in multi-cluster
- Implementing cluster-specific policies
- Using Kubernetes Federation with service mesh
- Hybrid cloud - integrating on-prem with cloud clusters
Module 10: Advanced Configuration and Extensibility - Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Istio control plane components - Citadel, Pilot, Galley, Mixer
- Installing Istio using Istioctl and Helm
- Profile-based installation - demo, default, minimal, and remote
- Verifying Istio installation and component health
- Configuring Istio with tolerations and affinity rules
- Namespace-level injection of sidecar proxies
- Manual vs automatic sidecar injection
- Setting up the Istio ingress gateway
- Configuring egress gateways for external traffic
- Securing control plane communication
- Resource requirements and tuning for production
- Cluster preparation - RBAC, CRDs, and CRIs
- Integrating with external identity providers
- Setting up mutual TLS across namespaces
- Using revisions for Istio upgrades and canaries
Module 5: Traffic Management with Istio - Gateways and virtual services - routing external traffic
- Destination rules and load balancing policies
- Creating weighted traffic splits for gradual rollouts
- Implementing canary deployments with Istio
- Header-based routing and A/B testing scenarios
- Timeouts and retry policies at the service level
- Circuit breaking with connection pools and outlier detection
- Failover policies across multiple clusters
- Configuring fault injection for resilience testing
- Mirroring traffic to staging environments
- Routing to multiple versions using subsets
- Rate limiting with Envoy filters
- Traffic policies for backup and disaster recovery
- Managing traffic across Kubernetes namespaces
- Using wildcards and regular expressions in routing rules
Module 6: Security and Identity in Service Mesh - Zero-trust networking principles in practice
- Automatic mTLS between sidecar proxies
- Configuring strict versus permissive mTLS modes
- Workload identity and service account binding
- X.509 certificate lifecycle management
- Integrating with external CA systems
- Role-based access control (RBAC) in Istio
- Authorization policies for service-to-service calls
- Securing service mesh control plane endpoints
- Preventing lateral movement in case of compromise
- Secure egress traffic with service entries
- Defining secure communication between clusters
- Best practices for secret management
- Using SELinux and AppArmor with sidecar containers
- Hardening Istio components against common exploits
Module 7: Observability and Telemetry Systems - Understanding Envoy proxy access logs and metrics
- Configuring Prometheus for Istio metric collection
- Setting up Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring
- Tracing distributed requests with Jaeger and Zipkin
- Creating custom dashboards for SLO tracking
- Request latency distribution and percentile analysis
- Monitoring service-to-service error rates
- Using Kiali for visualising service mesh topology
- Identifying traffic anomalies and misconfigurations
- Correlating logs, metrics, and traces (the three pillars)
- Integrating with existing logging pipelines (Fluentd, Logstash)
- Defining alerting rules based on mesh telemetry
- Service level objective (SLO) tracking with Istio metrics
- Monitoring control plane performance and health
- Creating operational runbooks from telemetry data
Module 8: Service Mesh Policy and Governance - Creating standardised service mesh policies across teams
- Enforcing secure defaults through config templates
- Policy as code - versioning and managing Istio configurations
- Using GitOps workflows for service mesh management
- Centralised versus decentralised control strategies
- Defining governance boundaries for development teams
- Automating policy validation with CI checks
- Service mesh quotas and resource allocation
- Managing mesh-wide defaults and overrides
- Implementing namespace-level isolation policies
- Compliance monitoring and audit trail generation
- Handling configuration drift and reconciliation
- Using OPA (Open Policy Agent) with Istio extensions
- Standardising naming, labels, and annotations
- Creating templates for common deployment patterns
Module 9: Multi-Cluster and Hybrid Deployments - Understanding multi-cluster topologies - primary-remote, primary-primary
- Setting up multicluster communication with Istio
- Shared control plane vs split control plane architectures
- Configuring cluster mesh with east-west gateways
- Cross-cluster service discovery mechanisms
- Routing traffic across regions and clouds
- Failover and disaster recovery across clusters
- Latency-aware routing and proximity detection
- Security model for cross-cluster mTLS
- Managing identity across clusters
- Unified observability across a cluster mesh
- Bandwidth and cost considerations in multi-cluster
- Implementing cluster-specific policies
- Using Kubernetes Federation with service mesh
- Hybrid cloud - integrating on-prem with cloud clusters
Module 10: Advanced Configuration and Extensibility - Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Zero-trust networking principles in practice
- Automatic mTLS between sidecar proxies
- Configuring strict versus permissive mTLS modes
- Workload identity and service account binding
- X.509 certificate lifecycle management
- Integrating with external CA systems
- Role-based access control (RBAC) in Istio
- Authorization policies for service-to-service calls
- Securing service mesh control plane endpoints
- Preventing lateral movement in case of compromise
- Secure egress traffic with service entries
- Defining secure communication between clusters
- Best practices for secret management
- Using SELinux and AppArmor with sidecar containers
- Hardening Istio components against common exploits
Module 7: Observability and Telemetry Systems - Understanding Envoy proxy access logs and metrics
- Configuring Prometheus for Istio metric collection
- Setting up Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring
- Tracing distributed requests with Jaeger and Zipkin
- Creating custom dashboards for SLO tracking
- Request latency distribution and percentile analysis
- Monitoring service-to-service error rates
- Using Kiali for visualising service mesh topology
- Identifying traffic anomalies and misconfigurations
- Correlating logs, metrics, and traces (the three pillars)
- Integrating with existing logging pipelines (Fluentd, Logstash)
- Defining alerting rules based on mesh telemetry
- Service level objective (SLO) tracking with Istio metrics
- Monitoring control plane performance and health
- Creating operational runbooks from telemetry data
Module 8: Service Mesh Policy and Governance - Creating standardised service mesh policies across teams
- Enforcing secure defaults through config templates
- Policy as code - versioning and managing Istio configurations
- Using GitOps workflows for service mesh management
- Centralised versus decentralised control strategies
- Defining governance boundaries for development teams
- Automating policy validation with CI checks
- Service mesh quotas and resource allocation
- Managing mesh-wide defaults and overrides
- Implementing namespace-level isolation policies
- Compliance monitoring and audit trail generation
- Handling configuration drift and reconciliation
- Using OPA (Open Policy Agent) with Istio extensions
- Standardising naming, labels, and annotations
- Creating templates for common deployment patterns
Module 9: Multi-Cluster and Hybrid Deployments - Understanding multi-cluster topologies - primary-remote, primary-primary
- Setting up multicluster communication with Istio
- Shared control plane vs split control plane architectures
- Configuring cluster mesh with east-west gateways
- Cross-cluster service discovery mechanisms
- Routing traffic across regions and clouds
- Failover and disaster recovery across clusters
- Latency-aware routing and proximity detection
- Security model for cross-cluster mTLS
- Managing identity across clusters
- Unified observability across a cluster mesh
- Bandwidth and cost considerations in multi-cluster
- Implementing cluster-specific policies
- Using Kubernetes Federation with service mesh
- Hybrid cloud - integrating on-prem with cloud clusters
Module 10: Advanced Configuration and Extensibility - Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Creating standardised service mesh policies across teams
- Enforcing secure defaults through config templates
- Policy as code - versioning and managing Istio configurations
- Using GitOps workflows for service mesh management
- Centralised versus decentralised control strategies
- Defining governance boundaries for development teams
- Automating policy validation with CI checks
- Service mesh quotas and resource allocation
- Managing mesh-wide defaults and overrides
- Implementing namespace-level isolation policies
- Compliance monitoring and audit trail generation
- Handling configuration drift and reconciliation
- Using OPA (Open Policy Agent) with Istio extensions
- Standardising naming, labels, and annotations
- Creating templates for common deployment patterns
Module 9: Multi-Cluster and Hybrid Deployments - Understanding multi-cluster topologies - primary-remote, primary-primary
- Setting up multicluster communication with Istio
- Shared control plane vs split control plane architectures
- Configuring cluster mesh with east-west gateways
- Cross-cluster service discovery mechanisms
- Routing traffic across regions and clouds
- Failover and disaster recovery across clusters
- Latency-aware routing and proximity detection
- Security model for cross-cluster mTLS
- Managing identity across clusters
- Unified observability across a cluster mesh
- Bandwidth and cost considerations in multi-cluster
- Implementing cluster-specific policies
- Using Kubernetes Federation with service mesh
- Hybrid cloud - integrating on-prem with cloud clusters
Module 10: Advanced Configuration and Extensibility - Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Custom Envoy filters for advanced routing logic
- Using Wasm modules to extend proxy functionality
- Creating custom telemetry adapters
- Extending Istio with Mixer adapters (legacy path)
- Integrating with external policy engines
- Using Istio attribute taxonomy for routing decisions
- Dynamic configuration updates without restarts
- Shadowing and mirroring for testing in production
- Header manipulation and enrichment patterns
- Integrating with identity federation systems
- Service mesh sidecar resource tuning
- Configuring custom health checks and readiness probes
- Using service mesh for non-HTTP protocols (gRPC, TCP)
- Integrating with message queues and event systems
- Handling long-lived connections and streaming data
Module 11: Scaling and Performance Optimisation - Measuring service mesh overhead and latency impact
- Optimising sidecar resource requests and limits
- Reducing CPU and memory footprint in production
- Caching strategies in the control plane
- Improving Pilot performance under high load
- Scaling the control plane for thousands of services
- Benchmarking data plane throughput
- Tuning Envoy for high-concurrency scenarios
- Monitoring control plane metrics for bottlenecks
- Using hierarchical destination rules for efficiency
- Minimising configuration push frequency
- Reducing network hops in service communication
- Managing large-scale deployments with naming conventions
- Cluster autoscaling considerations with sidecars
- Cross-region performance tuning
Module 12: Integration with DevOps and CI/CD - Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Embedding service mesh configuration in CI pipelines
- Using Helm charts with Istio sidecar injection
- Managing Istio configurations with Kustomize
- Automated testing of traffic policies
- Canary rollout automation with Argo Rollouts
- Progressive delivery with Flagger and Istio
- Automated rollback based on SLO violations
- Testing mesh policies in staging environments
- Infrastructure as code for service mesh
- Managing versions across environments
- Environment-specific configuration overrides
- Secrets management with external systems
- Integrating with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions
- Validation gates in deployment pipelines
- Versioning and tracking mesh configuration changes
Module 13: Troubleshooting and Operational Excellence - Diagnosing sidecar injection failures
- Analysing connection refused and timeout errors
- Using Istioctl debug and proxy-status commands
- Inspecting Envoy configuration dynamically
- Reading and interpreting Envoy access logs
- Debugging traffic routing issues
- Troubleshooting mTLS handshake failures
- Fixing policy misconfigurations
- Recovering from configuration drift
- Using Kiali to detect routing anomalies
- Identifying performance bottlenecks
- Analysing metric gaps in Prometheus
- Validating DNS and service discovery issues
- Restoring service connectivity after outages
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
Module 14: Real-World Implementation Projects - Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence
Module 15: Certification Preparation and Next Steps - Review of all core concepts and architecture patterns
- Practice scenarios for configuration and troubleshooting
- Case studies on real-world deployment challenges
- Final assessment preparation and study guide
- Hands-on configuration final project
- Submission of implementation portfolio
- Receiving feedback from instructors
- Certification of Completion requirements
- Adding the credential to LinkedIn and resumes
- Next steps: Istio Certified Associate or vendor-specific paths
- Joining the global Art of Service alumni network
- Access to advanced workshops and labs
- Continuing education pathways in cloud-native security
- Contributing to open-source service mesh communities
- Transitioning to service mesh consulting or architecture roles
- Designing a service mesh for a financial transaction system
- Implementing a global API platform with multi-region routing
- Securing internal microservices in a healthcare application
- Gradual rollout strategy for a large enterprise
- Migrating from API gateway to full mesh
- Running a pilot with a single microservice team
- Defining success metrics for mesh adoption
- Measuring reduction in incident response time
- Tracking improvement in deployment safety
- Calculating ROI from reduced downtime
- Stakeholder communication plan for rollout
- Training internal teams on mesh operations
- Creating documentation standards
- Handover process to SRE and operations teams
- Building an internal service mesh centre of excellence