Certification > Clouds and Containers > Istio Certified Associate (ICA)

CERTIFICATION

Own microservices like a pro. Prove your edge in securing, scaling, and managing microservices—plus, show you’re fluent in the service mesh tech cloud native teams rely on every day with the Istio certification, originally developed by Tetrate.

You have three ways to purchase!

1. Certification exam only – $250
2. Certification exam + THRIVE-ONE Annual Subscription (includes unlimited access to all e-Learning courses, SkillCreds, and premium Microlearning content) – $495
3. Certification exam + Istio Service Mesh Essentials (LFS245) course – $299

PLEASE NOTE: The ICA exam has changed. Please review more information about the changes on this page. All exams will now be tested on the new curriculum.

Who Is It For

The ICA is a pre-professional certification designed for engineers, CI/CD practitioners or anyone with special interests in Istio.

read less read more

About This Certification

A certified ICA will confirm their foundational knowledge of Istio principles, terminology, and best practices and demonstrate their ability to set up Istio.

read less read more

What It Demonstrates

The ICA demonstrates a candidate's solid understanding of Istio principles, terminology, and best practices to set up Istio.

read less read more

Domains & Competencies

Expand All

Collapse All

Installation, Upgrade & Configuration20%

Installing Istio with istioctl or Helm
Installing Istio in Sidecar or Ambient Mode
Customizing your Istio Installation
Upgrading Istio (Canary, In-Place)

Traffic Management35%

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 Workloads25%

Configuring Authorization
Configuring Authentication (mTLS, JWT)
Securing Edge Traffic with TLS

Troubleshooting20%

Troubleshooting Configuration
Troubleshooting the Mesh Control Plane
Troubleshooting the Mesh Data Plane

Exam Details & Resources

This exam is an online, proctored, performance-based and multiple-choice exam.

About the ICA

Originally developed and maintained by Tetrate, 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.

Prerequisites

There are no pre-requisites for this exam.

Reviews

Feb 2025

Great to have hands-on experience and access to the documentation at the same time. This is the closest you get to real life situations.

Oct 2025

The competencies are well-covered. I think the exam questions are a great indication of what you might expect to configure if you use Istio regularly. Maybe adding a question about telemetry/observability could be good, like using the telemetry api to enable access logs or collect traces.

Sep 2024

All of the Linux Foundation exams are fantastic - the hands-on experience really drives home the fact that you must understand the material in order to pass the exam.

Aug 2024

The practical exercises were fun, and covered many Istio scenarios that resemble daily activities/problems that could be faced in real workplace environment.

Jun 2024

I generally like performance-based exams. You cannot cheat here, you pass by pure skill.

May 2024

The exam is advanced, it explores all the area of service Mesh technology and is sure a strong addition to the skillsets.

Jan 2024

The exams are more challenging, and I like the Lab-based exams that validate the competency level rather than a Multiple choice question and answer.