Hands-On Microservices with Kubernetes

Pilot

Pilot is responsible for platform-agnostic service discovery, dynamic load balancing, and routing. It translates high-level routing rules and resiliency from its own rules API into an Envoy configuration. This abstraction layer allows Istio to run on multiple orchestration platforms. Pilot takes all the platform-specific information, converts it into the Envoy data plane configuration format, and propagates it to each Envoy proxy with the Envoy data plane API. Pilot is stateless; in Kubernetes, all the configuration is stored as custom resources definitions (CRDs) on etcd.