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