Azure / Azure/AKS

[Feature] Make Istio control plane resource requests configurable

Open
#5,838 1 comment 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @therealmitchconnors View on GitHub
feature-request istio networking
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
2.1k
Forks
395
Avg merge
2d 22h
Merged PRs (30d)
13

Description

**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.**
We use the Istio service mesh add-on for AKS. In clusters under high load (~1400 services, ~2000 pods in our application namespace), the istiod control plane pods consume significantly more memory and CPU than their resource requests — up to 7.7 Gi memory (requested: 2Gi, ~3.8× over) and 6 CPU cores (requested: 500m, ~12× over).

Because the scheduler uses requested values for bin-packing decisions, this massive under-request causes memory pressure on system nodes, leading to frequent evictions of other pods. Since istiod resource requests are managed by AKS and not configurable by the user, we have no way to mitigate this.

**Describe the solution you'd like**
It would be great if there was a way to configure requested memory and CPU for Istio control plane pods.

**Describe alternatives you've considered**
I tried increasing the number of system nodes to match the number of istiod pods so that each istiod pod can be placed on a separate system node. It helped to some extent but it didn't resolve the issue completely.
I specified `discoverySelectors` to limit how many namespaces Istio has to monitor.

**Additional context**
Memory usage of istiod discovery container

Image

CPU usage of istiod discovery container

Image

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.