You must be able to write VirtualService and DestinationRule YAML that routes by header, splits traffic by weight, and mirrors requests. The single most important thing: subsets live in DestinationRule, while VirtualService decides which subset and weight receives traffic.
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Domain overview
Traffic Management covers Istio's routing and resilience APIs: VirtualService, DestinationRule, Gateway, and ServiceEntry. The exam tests whether you can shape request flow with match conditions, weighted routes, subsets, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and traffic mirroring, and whether you understand how Envoy sidecars act on the configuration you write.
Exam objectives
Writing VirtualService http match blocks on headers, URI, method, and source labels
Defining DestinationRule subsets and policies for load balancing, outlier detection, and connection pools
Configuring Gateway and ServiceEntry to expose mesh services and external endpoints
Applying traffic shifting, mirroring, retries, timeouts, and fault injection via Istio CRDs
Putting subset definitions in the VirtualService instead of the DestinationRule, so routing to a version silently fails
Forgetting that a VirtualService route to a service with no matching pods returns 503, not a fallback
Assuming mirror/shadow traffic counts toward the primary route or that weights must sum to 100
Click any question to see the full explanation and answer options, or start a focused practice session above.
You need to route 10% of traffic to a new version of your service. Which object do you configure?
2Which THREE settings are required in a VirtualService for a canary deployment?
3You need to enforce a 5-second timeout on all calls to a specific service. Where is this configured?
4Which TWO fields are mandatory in a Gateway resource?
5You need to expose an application running in the mesh to traffic from outside the cluster. Which resource is required to define the entry point?
6A DestinationRule is configured with a 'v1' subset but traffic is failing. Where should you check for the label match?
7A team wants to perform a canary deployment by shifting 10% of traffic to a new version of their service. Which resource allows this weighting?
8You have an external dependency that is not in the Kubernetes registry. How do you allow the mesh services to communicate with it?
9You want to enforce mTLS globally for all services in the cluster. Which resource should you apply?
10When configuring a retry policy for a VirtualService, which parameter defines the maximum time allowed for a single attempt?
11What is the default Istio load balancing algorithm?
12To ensure traffic to a service is encrypted via mTLS, where should you verify the policy?
13A service is experiencing high latency. You want to implement a circuit breaker to prevent cascading failures. Which resource do you use?
14A VirtualService is not correctly routing traffic to a new version. Which tool helps verify the actual route configuration loaded in the proxy?
15You need to restrict traffic to a specific subset of a service defined in a DestinationRule. What should you use in your VirtualService destination block?
16You want to inject a fault to test application resilience. Which field in the VirtualService supports this?
17Which command helps troubleshoot configuration issues by analyzing the cluster for errors?
18What does the 'mirror' feature in a VirtualService do?
19How do you specify a custom header match in a VirtualService?
20Where do you define the hosts that a Gateway will listen on?
21You need to inspect the envoy config for a specific pod. Which command do you use?
22Which field in the DestinationRule allows defining different versions of a service?
23You want to limit the number of concurrent connections to a service. Which field in the DestinationRule handles this?
24What protocol does the Gateway resource support?
25How do you handle SNI-based routing in a Gateway?
26What is the purpose of the 'retryOn' field in a VirtualService?
27If a VirtualService has a route to a service that has no pods matching the label, what happens?
28You need to ensure that traffic is only routed to healthy pods. What feature does this?
29What is the command to view the status of all pods including proxies?
30Which command lists all virtual services in the current namespace?
31You want to perform a 'headers' modification on an incoming request. Which resource allows this?
32Which component is responsible for enforcing traffic policies in the data plane?
33What is the primary function of the 'istio-proxy' container in a pod?
34Which type of routing allows you to route to different services based on URL path?
35Which field in the VirtualService allows you to redirect an incoming request to a different path?
36What is the purpose of 'istioctl analyze'?
37If you want to perform traffic shadowing, which field do you use?
38What is the default behavior when no VirtualService is defined for a service?
39Which tool provides a GUI for visualizing your traffic management rules?
40What is the standard path to install istioctl?
41Which resource type is used for mTLS policy?
42You need to route traffic to a service based on the 'x-user-type' header. How is this defined?
43What is the purpose of the 'istio-system' namespace?
44Which field in VirtualService is used for A/B testing?
45Which of the following are valid traffic management components in Istio? (Choose TWO)
46Which parameters can be configured in a VirtualService retry policy? (Choose TWO)
47You need to define a local service that is not in the cluster. How?
48What information can you get from 'istioctl proxy-config'? (Choose THREE)
49Which of the following are valid Gateway configurations? (Choose TWO)
50Which items can be configured under DestinationRule trafficPolicy? (Choose THREE)
51Which actions can a VirtualService perform on a request? (Choose TWO)
52Which resources control mTLS settings? (Choose TWO)
53Which of these are valid sub-commands for istioctl? (Choose TWO)
54Which of the following are valid DestinationRule fields? (Choose THREE)
55Which are valid match conditions in VirtualService? (Choose THREE)
56To perform a canary deployment, you have two versions of a service. Which resource do you use to split traffic between them?
57You need to expose a service to traffic outside the mesh using Istio. Which resource is required to configure the entry point for incoming traffic?
58How do you implement a circuit breaker to eject a pod that returns 5xx errors?
59You want to access an external API (e.g., api.google.com) from within your mesh. What must you configure?
60You have a service that occasionally hangs. You want to ensure that if a request takes longer than 2 seconds, it fails immediately. Which field do you configure?
61Which field in the VirtualService allows you to redirect traffic to a different URI?
62You want to route traffic to a specific version of a service based on a header. Where do you define the subset?
63What is the function of the 'weight' parameter in a VirtualService route?
64Where do you configure the hostnames that a Gateway should accept?
65You want to inject a 5-second delay into requests for testing. Which resource allows this?
66You are observing 503 errors. You want to automatically retry failed requests. Where is this configured?
67You want to test a new version of a service by sending a copy of live traffic to it. What feature should you use?
68You notice your traffic is not being routed correctly despite a VirtualService. Which step is most likely to resolve common issues?
69What is the primary purpose of the 'subset' field in a VirtualService destination?
70Which resource configuration is necessary to allow a service to communicate with a database outside the mesh using TLS?
71When using a ServiceEntry for a TCP service, what protocol should be specified?
72To strip a URL prefix before passing a request to a backend service, which field do you use?
73Which load balancing policy would you choose to ensure requests from the same user always hit the same pod?
74Which command is used to view the effective configuration of a specific Envoy proxy?
75How do you specify a header-based match in a VirtualService?
76What is the default load balancing policy if none is specified in the DestinationRule?
77You want to limit the total number of concurrent connections to a service. Where is this defined?
78Which resource is used to provide a unified entry point for multiple services?
79Which THREE fields are found within the 'trafficPolicy' block of a DestinationRule?
80Which TWO actions can a VirtualService perform on a request?
81Which TWO resources are essential for configuring traffic splitting between versions?
82Which TWO settings are configured within the 'outlierDetection' block?
83Which THREE configurations affect the way traffic is distributed across pods?
84Which THREE features are supported by the Istio 'trafficPolicy' in a DestinationRule?
85Which TWO mechanisms are used to secure traffic within the mesh?
86Which THREE are types of traffic management patterns?
87Which THREE are valid load balancing policies in Istio?
88Which TWO components must be configured to allow external traffic to enter the mesh?
89Your team runs a payments service in the 'prod' namespace with a Kubernetes Service named 'payments' listening on port 8443. During a canary rollout you created a Gateway 'payments-gw' in the 'istio-system' namespace and a VirtualService 'payments-vs' in the 'prod' namespace that references the gateway as 'payments-gw'. Clients report HTTP 404 errors when calling the service, but the sidecar-injected payments pods show healthy endpoints and the Gateway pod logs report 'no matching route'. Which change resolves the routing failure?
90A platform engineer is migrating a legacy service into the mesh. The service exposes an HTTP API on port 8080 but also a raw TCP admin port on 9090. The engineer wants the sidecar to treat port 8080 as HTTP so that Istio can apply request-level routing, while treating port 9090 as opaque TCP. Which configuration achieves this?
91A team wants to shift 10 percent of traffic to a new version of a service for a canary, while keeping 90 percent on the stable version. Both versions are healthy and registered as subsets in a DestinationRule. Which VirtualService configuration accomplishes this?
92A mesh operator needs to configure a DestinationRule so that the sidecar reuses existing HTTP/2 connections to an upstream service and automatically ejects endpoints that return repeated 5xx errors. Which two configuration elements are required to meet these goals? (Choose two.)
93A developer needs to expose an internal service to external clients through the Istio ingress gateway on port 443 using TLS termination at the gateway. The service listens on port 80 inside the mesh. Which pairing of resources is required?
You must be able to write VirtualService and DestinationRule YAML that routes by header, splits traffic by weight, and mirrors requests. The single most important thing: subsets live in DestinationRule, while VirtualService decides which subset and weight receives traffic.
The Courseiva ICA question bank contains 93 questions in the Traffic Management domain. Click any question to see the full explanation and answer breakdown.
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