So I recently learned that Pilot can hold long running open gRPC streams concurrently to all(?) Envoy processes in the mesh to push for xDS updates.
I don’t know how efficient this gRPC stream is (memory and other server resource wise, like file handles?), but a single bottleneck (Pilot) doesn’t give me an easy feeling as the mesh scales up.
Is it possible to configure multiple instances of Pilots in one Istio mesh for load balancing? If so, will the data be consistent (eventual consistency is ok) among them?
Thank you!
Yes, Pilot is stateless as far as Envoys are concerned. You can have as many as you like.