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Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh:Upgrade sidecar proxies

Last Updated:Mar 11, 2026

After you upgrade the control plane of a Service Mesh (ASM) instance, upgrade the sidecar proxies to align the data plane with the new control plane version.

Two upgrade methods are available:

MethodWhen to useHow it works
Automatic injectionAutomatic sidecar injection is enabled for the namespaceRedeploy workloads so ASM injects upgraded proxies into new pods
Manual injectionAutomatic sidecar injection is not enabledRun istioctl kube-inject to inject upgraded proxies into the application YAML

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

Important

Sidecar proxies run on the data plane. To upgrade them, you update the data plane kubeconfig file, not the ASM instance. Get the kubeconfig file from the ACK console, not the ASM console.

Upgrade through automatic injection

If automatic sidecar proxy injection is enabled for your namespace, redeploy your workloads. ASM injects upgraded sidecar proxies into the new pods during redeployment.

  1. Log on to the ACK console and click Clusters in the left-side navigation pane.

  2. On the Clusters page, click the name of a cluster and choose Workloads > Deployments in the left-side navigation pane.

  3. On the Deployments page, redeploy the workloads:

    ScenarioSteps
    Single workloadIn the Actions column, find the workload and choose More > Redeploy. In the Redeploy message, click Confirm.
    Multiple workloadsSelect the workloads in the Name column and click Batch Redeploy at the bottom of the page. In the Confirm message, click OK.

Upgrade through manual injection

If automatic sidecar proxy injection is not enabled, run the following command to inject an upgraded sidecar proxy into your application:

kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f <your-application.yaml>)

Replace <your-application.yaml> with the path to a raw application YAML file that does not contain sidecar proxy configuration.