Fix Docker rate limit issues in Istio sidecars

Kenneth Skertchly

·Nov 9, 2020

Earlier this month, Dockerhub announced that they would be enforcing limits on image pulls. That has meant that I’ve had to deal with several unforseen problems, like Istio defaulting to “Always” for their sidecar (and other services) ImagePullPolicy.

Fortunately, the ImagePullPolicy can be configured through the Istio Operator. This is the change you need to add to the operator yaml:

# op
apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
metadata:
  namespace: istio-system
  name: foo
spec:
  profile: default
  values:
    global:
      imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent

After that, just use istioctl to update the configuration:

istioctl install -f operator.yaml