PLEASE NOTE: The changes to the Istio Certified Associate (ICA Exam) will be released no earlier than Tuesday, August 12, 2025 00:00 UTC. Any exams taken on or after that date will reflect the changes previously communicated.
The ICA Exam will be offline from July 28, 2025 to August 11, 2025 while we prepare the ICA exam for the planned changes.
If you wish to test on the current curriculum, you must schedule to take the ICA exam before July 28, 2025.
These updates are part of our ongoing efforts to ensure that an Istio Certified Associate (ICA) has the most updated skills, knowledge, and competence needed in the industry.
What is changing on ICA?
- Please note the new Domains and Competencies below as many will change
- The ICA environment will be upgraded to v1.26
NOTE: It does NOT matter if the exam reservation happens to be for a first attempt or a retake, nor does it matter on what date you completed the exam purchase. The only date that matters is the date you sit for the exam.
About Istio Certified Associate (ICA)
The ICA is designed for anyone who has a hand in enhancing the performance, reliability and security of applications, particularly in cloud native, Kubernetes-based container orchestration systems. It helps with managing many of the complexities associated with service-to-service communication and provides a unified way to manage and secure these interactions.
Installation, Upgrades, and 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
