Preparing for Istio Certified Associate (ICA)

What is ICA?

For the first time in September 2021, CIAT (Certified Istio Administrator by Tetrate) was launched from the Linus foundation CIAT has it’s new name that is ICA (Istio Certified Associate)

ICA is known as Istio Certified Associate(ICA), an service mesh technology and an open source that purpose is to support with the security and  management of all the application that based on microservices. One of the most important characteristics of Istio is to give a well organized monitor services, secure and connect. A way to deliver service-to-service authentication, balancing and monitoring without having services code changes.

This certifications is announced by CNCF and this exam provides you a deep knowledge about the Istio terminology, principles in order to elevate Istio. Basically this course is created for CI/CD interpreter, engineers and any person can go for it who have a little knowledge or interest on Istio.

 

Benefit Of Having Istio

When you are going to pursue for this technical certification course for ICA, definitely you are going to get some best benefits and some of these benefits are as follow:

Improved the knowledge and skills: This certification program consists extensive examination and training. When you have this certification course then you have a deep understanding about Istio, a service mesh technology and that is very important for your career.

Career Growth: Having this certification helps you to grow your career as in a peak, this may makes you extra appealing  to employers and it is more beneficial is when the company is using Istio or doing some planning  to implement Istio.

Salary Increase:  The salary part is totally depend upon the several industries and employers but in general when you have this certification on your hand, it sometimes lead to good compensation and a high salary.

Professional Growth:  This certified course also help in your professional growth as it enhance your skill and knowledge in Istio, that also support you to gauge your proficiency and areas where you might need any improvement.

Credibility: After achieving the certification course, you  can add credibility to your professional profile, indicating to potential employers, colleagues and clients, that you have the necessary knowledge and skills related to Istio.

Detailed competencies

Istio Installation, Upgrade & Configuration (7%)

• Use the Istio Command-Line Interface (CLI) to install a basic cluster • Use the IstioOperator API to customize and configure Istio components installation • Use overlays to customize Istio component settings

Traffic Management (40%)

• Understand and control sidecar injection and configuration using Sidecar resource
• Use Gateway resource to configure ingress and egress traffic
• Understand how to use ServiceEntry resource for adding entries to internal service registry
• Understand traffic routing and how to configure routing between different service versions
• Define traffic policies using DestinationRule
• Configure traffic mirroring capabilities

Resilience and Fault Injection (20%)

• Understand and configure circuit breakers (with or without outlier detection)
• Use resilience features
• Configure fault injection

Securing Workloads (20%)

• Understand security features of Istio
• Set up Istio authorization for HTTP/TCP traffic in the mesh
• Configure mutual TLS at the mesh, namespace, and workload level

 Advanced Scenarios (13%)

• Understand how to onboard non-Kubernetes workloads to the mesh
• Customize Envoy configuration using Envoy Filters
• Troubleshoot configuration issues

Some Important Instruction

While pursuing for the exam you need to follow some important instruction and these are:

• Multiple type questions are asked in the examination and exam is held online.
• Candidates have 2 hours to complete this online exam.
• After completing the exam, you can get the result within 24 hours.
• It’s important to have your own computer while you are giving the exam and that supported Operating System, all browsers were supported.
• Check the internet connectivity and it is essential you turn off the bandwith-intensive services such as dropbox, BigTorrent, file sync etc.

It is essential to have any IDs while taking the exam and some acceptable kind of IDs are:

 

• National identity card State or provision-issued identity card
• Government-issued driver’s license
• International travel passport
• Government-issued driver’s
• Green card or visa

 

Conclusion: One of the best way to enhance your career in microservices and cloud-native technologies is to get the ICA (Istio Certified Associate) certification. This certification not only validates your expertise in Istio but also demonstrates your commitment to staying current in this rapidly evolving field. As you embark on your journey to prepare for the ICA exam, remember to focus on the core concepts, hands-on experience, and best practices we’ve discussed in this blog.