The Istio manager is the microservice mesh orchestrator for the Istio proxy and the Istio mixer. It is responsible for dynamically configuring proxies in a cluster platform environment to support L7-based routing, request destination policies (load balancing, circuit breaking), and point-to-point control policies such as fault injection, retries, and time-outs.
Please see istio.io to learn about the overall Istio project and how to get in touch with us. To learn how you can contribute to any of the Istio components, including the manager, please see the Istio contribution guidelines.
The Istio manager design gives an architectural overview of the manager components - cluster platform abstractions, service model, and the proxy controllers.
If you are interested in contributing to the project, please take a look at the build instructions and the testing infrastructure.