# Controllers

Istio has a variety of [controllers](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/architecture/controller/), which basically watch some inputs and do something.
This can be reading from Kubernetes and writing other objects back, writing to proxies over XDS, etc.

Unfortunately, writing controllers is very error prone, even for seemingly simple cases.
To work around this, Istio has a variety of abstractions meant to make writing controllers easier.

## Clients