ISTIO

Istio consulting and production troubleshooting

RTZ Labs provides Istio consulting for production Kubernetes environments – troubleshooting service mesh latency and failure behavior, reviewing traffic policy and mTLS configuration, and stabilizing Istio installations that have become difficult to operate.

Istio problems rarely announce themselves as Istio problems. They arrive as unexplained tail latency, pods that fail on startup, retries that amplify a partial outage into a full one, or a control plane that struggles as the mesh grows. We work through the traffic path with evidence from the proxies themselves rather than from assumptions about what the configuration should be doing.

All expertise

What we do with Istio

Diagnose latency introduced by sidecar proxies, and separate mesh overhead from application and network latency
Review VirtualService, DestinationRule, and Sidecar resources for conflicting or overly broad traffic policy
Analyze retry, timeout, and outlier detection settings that turn partial failures into cascading ones
Investigate pod startup ordering and sidecar readiness races that cause intermittent deployment failures
Review mTLS and PeerAuthentication configuration, including migration between permissive and strict modes
Assess control plane sizing, configuration distribution, and scope as the mesh grows
Establish mesh observability – proxy metrics, access logs, and distributed traces that reflect real traffic

Problems we are called in for

Usually described this way before anyone knows the cause.

p99 latency rose after adopting the mesh and nobody can point to where

Pods intermittently fail on startup or fail readiness checks after a deploy

A single slow dependency takes down more than it should, and retries appear to be making it worse

Istio configuration has accumulated and no one is confident what a change will affect

The upgrade path has been deferred long enough that upgrading now feels risky

mTLS is enabled somewhere but the actual coverage is unclear

Scope and boundaries

We work with Istio on Kubernetes, primarily on AWS and Amazon EKS. We do not provide 24/7 outsourced mesh operations.

Provider: RTZ Labs
Availability: Remote, serving the United States and Canada
How to start: Email contact@rtzlabs.io or use the contact form.

Production Reliability

Reduce incidents, improve observability, and build infrastructure your team can trust – on AWS and Kubernetes.

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Fractional SRE / Platform Engineering

Senior infrastructure expertise embedded into your engineering team – without hiring a full Platform/SRE organization.