w or custom infrastructure backends.</p><p><a href="/v0.6/docs/concepts/policy-and-control/mixer.html#adapters">Learn more about adapters</a>.</p></dd><dt id="attribute">Attribute</dt><dd role="definition" aria-labelledby="attribute"><p>Attributes control the runtime behavior of services running in the mesh. Attributes are named and typed pieces of metadata describing ingress and egress traffic and the environment this traffic occurs in. An Istio attribute carries a specific piece of information such as the