CNCF-ICA Exam Information and Outline
Istio Certified Associate
Syllabus Update Checked on: October 30, 2026
CNCF-ICA Exam Syllabus & Study Guide
Before you start practicing with our exam simulator, it is essential to understand the
official CNCF-ICA exam objectives. This course outline serves as your roadmap.
The information below reflects the 2026 syllabus defined by
CNCF.
Below are complete topics detail with latest syllabus and course outline, that will help you good knowledge about exam objectives and topics that you have to prepare. These contents are covered in questions and answers pool of exam.
- Exam Format
- Performance-based exam on Istio service mesh tasks; 2 hours
- Installation, Upgrades and Configuration
- Installing Istio with istioctl and Helm
- Customizing installation and canary upgrades
- Sidecar and ambient mode
- Traffic Management
- Gateways, VirtualServices and DestinationRules
- Traffic shifting, mirroring and routing
- Egress control and ServiceEntries
- Resilience and Fault Injection
- Timeouts, retries and circuit breaking
- Fault injection for testing
- Securing Workloads
- Mutual TLS and PeerAuthentication
- AuthorizationPolicy and request authentication (JWT)
- Troubleshooting
- istioctl analyze and proxy-status
- Observability with metrics, logs and tracing