How to build a scalable control plane

I've spent the majority of my career building Istio's control plane, Istiod, with an emphasis on making it highly performant and scalable. And while it has come a very (very) long way, it's still a long way off from what a control plane could be. It's not alone. When I worked on building an open benchmark of Kubernetes Gateway control planes, I was surprised to find that no implementation met what I felt was a reasonable bar for a "highly scalable and performant control plane". ...

September 16, 2025 · 4 min