Read the Mesh as Two Planes
Explain how control-plane intent and data-plane behavior differ in a service mesh.
A mesh failure is not automatically a pod failure. The data plane and control plane answer different questions. Control plane: what should happen The control plane stores intent. In Istio, objects such as VirtualService, DestinationRule, PeerAuthentication, and AuthorizationPolicy describe routing, subsets, identity, and access decisions. If the desired state is wrong, every healthy proxy can faithfully enforce the wrong thing. Data plane: what is happening The data plane is the request path through proxies. It can show response codes, latency, retries, mTLS identity, and upstream health. This is where you confirm whether the requested route, endpoint, and policy are actually…
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