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This is the most important module and the longest, so let’s dive into what we’re going to cover in this module. This module examines sidecars, focusing on the resource and its default behavior. Virtual services, possibly the most important resource in the Istio service mesh. I would say that around 30 to 35% of all the questions you’re going to get in the ICA exam will involve a virtual service. And if we’re talking about importance, I guess second on the list would be DestinationRules. This is a must-know for the ICA exam.
The image outlines three objectives: discussing sidecar resource configuration and behavior, understanding traffic routing using Virtual Services, and demonstrating subsets and load balancing with Destination Rules.
This is where splitting traffic is configured. We’ll talk about exposing applications to the public using ingress gateways and also outgoing traffic using egress gateways. We’ll talk about how we can introduce external services, something like a database or a web app, and bring it into the service mesh using ServiceEntries. We’ll talk about the pros and cons to various release methods and show you a better way called Istio traffic mirroring or A/B testing. We’ll be talking about the issues that can happen in a microservices stack and how they can be avoided using circuit breaking. We’ll look at how we can prevent cascading failures when those bottlenecks happen. Resilience isn’t just about avoiding issues, but more about being prepared for them when they do happen. And fault injection is the answer. We’ll look at intentionally implementing delays and aborts to see how the application behaves. We’re going to be using timeouts and retries as a safety measure for those errors. And finally, after we talked about all of these different Istio resources, we’ll have a look at how to set up ambient mode and
The image lists objectives numbered 09 to 11, including simulating delays, using timeouts and retries, and Istio’s new Ambient Mode. The text is placed alongside a gradient blue sidebar labeled "Objectives."
go over a demo on how to use layer 4 traffic using ztunnels and layer 7 traffic using the waypoint proxies, using HTTPRoutes. Although I should mention again that none of this is going to be in the actual ICA exam. And by this, I mean the actual ambient mode. So we’re not going to deep dive into, you know, HTTPRoutes and EnvoyFilters. We are going to cover ambient mode, but the exam does not go in too deep. So we’re not going to go in too deep into ambient mode. And, you know, there’s a lot to cover in this module.

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