Istio

Istio is a service mesh technology and it brings traffic management, telemetry and security to complex kubernetes deployments. In a nutshell Istio uses Envoy proxy to inject proxy container to every pod to implement these features.

Setup minikube cluster to deploy istio

    minikube start --cpus 6 --memory 8192 --profile istio

Istio Install

• download the latest Istio package from website

      curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | sh -

• move into the directory and add /bin path to shell profile, so "istioctl" command will be available

      vi .zshrc
      export PATH=/Users/ravi/istio-1.16.1/bin:$PATH
  

• Install

      istioctl install --set profile=demo -y
  

• Instruct to Istio to deploy envoy sidecar container by adding namespace label to default namespace

      kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled
  
  

Install sample applicatoin called microservices-demo from GoogleCloud (only work with X64 cpu architecture)

• create a local copy of manifest file https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo/blob/main/release/kubernetes-manifests.yaml

• apply the manifest file

  kubectl apply -f kubernetes-manifests.yaml
  

• Make sure all the relavant pods and services are in running state with istio proxy

  kubectl get pods,svc
  

• To enable envoy sidecar proxy to existing deployments we need to restart the deployment

  kubectl rollout restart deployment
  

Install Istio Addons for data visualization and monitoring

• Apply addons manifest files from /istio-1.16.1/samples/addons folder

    kubectl apply -f ~/istio-1.16.1/samples/addons 
  

• Make sure addons deployments are running on istio-system namespace

    kubectl -n istio-system get deployments
  

• To access kiali dashboard from your local pc, you can use one of following methods. you need to have app:xxx label configured to kiali's datavisualization graph to work

    istioctl dashboard kiali
    # similarly you can open grafana,prometheus,jaeger dashboards
  

    kubectl port-forward -n istio-system services/kiali 1111:20001
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:1111 -> 20001   #can access dashboard on url 127.0.0.1:1111
  

    minikube service kiali -n istio-system --url
    service istio-system/kiali has no node port
    http://127.0.0.1:57828   # can access dashboard on this url
  

• Kiali Dashboard provides good datavisualization graph how microservices are communicating with each other and other metrices.