Week 19 Capstone - Strict mTLS Broke East-West Traffic
Shop went STRICT on mTLS and east-west calls from frontend to backend started failing. Restore the path.
Puzzle Overview
The shop team flipped PeerAuthentication to STRICT after enabling Istio in the `shop` namespace. The `frontend` and `backend` Deployments both report Ready, and the `backend` Service has endpoints — yet every request from a frontend pod to `http://backend:8000/health` fails.
Istio is installed, istioctl is on PATH, and the manifests the previous engineer left behind are under `/root/shop/`. Something about how the mesh authenticates peers no longer matches what is actually running in that namespace.
Your job: restore frontend → backend connectivity so a request from a frontend pod to `http://backend:8000/health` succeeds.
Technologies Covered
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