Installation Configuration Profiles

This page describes the built-in configuration profiles that can be used when installing Istio. The profiles provide customization of the Istio control plane and of the sidecars for the Istio data plane. You can start with one of Istio’s built-in configuration profiles and then further customize the configuration for your specific needs. The following built-in configuration profiles are currently available:

1. default: enables components according to the default settings of the IstioOperator API (recommend for production deployments). You can display the default setting by running the command istioctl profile dump.

2. demo: configuration designed to showcase Istio functionality with modest resource requirements. It is suitable to run the Bookinfo application and associated tasks. This is the configuration that is installed with the quick start instructions, but you can later customize the configuration to enable additional features if you wish to explore more advanced tasks.

3. minimal: the minimal set of components necessary to use Istio’s traffic management features.

4. sds: similar to the default profile, but also enables Istio’s SDS (secret discovery service). This profile comes with additional authentication features enabled by default (Strict Mutual TLS).

5. remote: used for configuring remote clusters of a multicluster mesh with a shared control plane configuration.

The components marked as X are installed within each profile:

To further customize Istio and install addons, you can add one or more --set <key>=<value> options in the istioctl manifest command that you use when installing Istio. Refer to customizing the configuration for details.