#Sidecar injection

In order to take advantage of all of Istio's features, pods in the service mesh must be running an Istio sidecar proxy.

#About sidecar injection

Sidecar proxy injection is primarily controlled through labels applied at either the namespace or pod level.

When enabled in namespace, automatic injection injects the proxy configuration at pod creation time using an admission controller, ensures any new pods in that namespace include a sidecar.

The revision label is also used to dictates which Istio control plane instance the sidecar will associate with.

Note that unlike manual injection, automatic injection occurs at the pod-level. You won't see any change to the deployment itself. Instead, you'll want to check individual pods (via kubectl describe) to see the injected proxy.

#Reference

• About admission controllers (Kubernetes documentation)
• Istio sidecar injection problems (Istio documentation)