Istio Certified Associate (ICA)

Own microservices like a pro. Prove your edge in securing, scaling, and managing microservices—plus, show you’re fluent in the service mesh tech cloud native teams rely on every day with the Istio certification, originally developed by Tetrate.

The ICA demonstrates a candidate's solid understanding of Istio principles, terminology, and best practices to set up Istio.

The ICA is a pre-professional certification designed for engineers, CI/CD practitioners or anyone with special interests in Istio.

Installation, Upgrade & Configuration - 20%

Installing Istio with istioctl or Helm

Installing Istio in Sidecar or Ambient Mode

Customizing your Istio Installation

Upgrading Istio (Canary, In-Place)

Traffic Management - 35%

Configuring Ingress and Egress Traffic

Configuring Routing within a Service Mesh

Defining Traffic Policies with Destination Rules

Configuring Traffic Shifting

Connecting In-Mesh Workloads to External Workloads and Services

Using Resilience Features (circuit breaking, failover, outlier detection, timeouts, retries)

Using Fault Injection

Securing Workloads - 25%

Configuring Authorization

Configuring Authentication (mTLS, JWT)

Securing Edge Traffic with TLS

Troubleshooting - 20%

Troubleshooting Configuration

Troubleshooting the Mesh Control Plane

Troubleshooting the Mesh Data Plane

A certified ICA will confirm their foundational knowledge of Istio principles, terminology, and best practices and demonstrate their ability to set up Istio.

How to register & take exam: TBC (Link to FAQ pages of the website)

Linux Foundation Global Certification & Confidentiality Agreement: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/lf-cert-agreement/

Candidate Handbook: https://training.linuxfoundation.org/go/LFCA-candidate-handbook

ICA Important Instructions: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/important-instructions-ica

ICA Frequently Asked Questions: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/frequently-asked-questions-ica