Istio Hands-On

1 Create a Kubernetes instance on Minikube

I am going to assume that you already have Minikube installed on your workstation. If this is not the case follow the instructions in the Minikube documention.

To start a Kubernetes instance enter the following command in a shell:

minikube start --cpus 2 --memory 4096 --driver docker

This will start an instance with 2 virtual CPUs, 4 GB om RAM, using Docker (Desktop) as your virtualization platform.

NOTE: bwLehrpool

bwLehrpool has sufficient RAM to increase memory for Minikube, you can use this command instead:

minikube start --cpus 2 --memory 6144 --driver docker

which will assign 6 GB of RAM.

NOTE According to the Istio documentation a Minikube instance with at least 4 virtual CPUs and 16 GB of RAM is required. I have tested this workshop with the smaller configuration and it works but of course will not win a price for high performance.

2 Install Istio

This workshop is based on Istio version 1.20.1 (which was released in November 2023).

Official instructions can be found here.

1. Download Istio 1.20.1:

   Note: On bwLehrpool you can skip this step, Istio 1.20.1 is already downloaded in the student home directory! In this lab you will NOT work in the PERSISTENT directory.

    curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | ISTIO_VERSION=1.20.1 TARGET_ARCH=x86_64 sh -
   

2. Change into the Istio directory

    cd istio-1.20.1
   

   (On bwLehrpool this is /home/student/istio-1.20.1)

3. Install Istio:

    bin/istioctl install --set profile=demo -y
   

   Output:

    ✔ Istio core installed 
    ✔ Istiod installed
    ✔ Egress gateways installed 
    ✔ Ingress gateways installed 
    ✔ Installation complete
    Made this installation the default for injection and validation.
   

4. Verify the the Istio installation:

   Istio is installed into the istio-system namespace on Kubernetes.

    kubectl get pod -n istio-system
   

   Output looks like this:

    NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
    istio-egressgateway-7f4864f59c-jz6f9   1/1     Running   0          4m47s
    istio-ingressgateway-55d9fb9f-592zs    1/1     Running   0          4m47s
    istiod-555d47cb65-ss54h                1/1     Running   0          5m12s
   

   The pod identifiers will be different but there should be 3 pods for egress gateway, ingress gateway, and istiod, all in status ‘Running’.

    kubectl get svc -n istio-system
   

   Output looks like this:

    NAME                   TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                                                                      AGE
    istio-egressgateway    ClusterIP      10.100.115.226   <none>        80/TCP,443/TCP                                                               7m2s
    istio-ingressgateway   LoadBalancer   10.107.101.80    <pending>     15021:31820/TCP,80:31043/TCP,443:30723/TCP,31400:31291/TCP,15443:31719/TCP   7m2s
    istiod                 ClusterIP      10.96.232.106    <none>        15010/TCP,15012/TCP,443/TCP,15014/TCP                                        7m27s
   

   Output should show 3 services, again for egress gateway, ingress gateway, and istiod.

5. VERY IMPORTANT: Enable automatic sidecar injection for default namespace

    kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled	
   

   Without this setting we will not use Istio although it is installed!

3 Install Telemetry Addons

We will now install the telemetry or observability add-ons:

• Prometheus (Monitoring)
• Grafana (Monitoring)
• Jaeger (Distributed Tracing)
• Kiali (Istio dashboard)

While still in the istio-1.20.1 directory, issue the following commands

kubectl apply -f samples/addons/prometheus.yaml
kubectl apply -f samples/addons/grafana.yaml
kubectl apply -f samples/addons/jaeger.yaml
kubectl apply -f samples/addons/kiali.yaml

Verify:

kubectl get pod -n istio-system

It will take a while for all the new pods to start, this is pushing the tiny cluster to its limits.

Output:

NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
grafana-6ccd56f4b6-2jnd7               1/1     Running   0          2m11s
istio-egressgateway-7f4864f59c-jz6f9   1/1     Running   0          17m
istio-ingressgateway-55d9fb9f-592zs    1/1     Running   0          17m
istiod-555d47cb65-ss54h                1/1     Running   0          17m
jaeger-5d44bc5c5d-r9mp5                1/1     Running   0          2m3s
kiali-79b86ff5bc-fpzd7                 1/1     Running   0          117s
prometheus-64fd8ccd65-2dgdc            2/2     Running   0          2m18s

And for the services:

kubectl get svc -n istio-system

Output:

NAME                   TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                                                                      AGE
grafana                ClusterIP      10.96.207.7      <none>        3000/TCP                                                                     2m43s
istio-egressgateway    ClusterIP      10.100.115.226   <none>        80/TCP,443/TCP                                                               17m
istio-ingressgateway   LoadBalancer   10.107.101.80    <pending>     15021:31820/TCP,80:31043/TCP,443:30723/TCP,31400:31291/TCP,15443:31719/TCP   17m
istiod                 ClusterIP      10.96.232.106    <none>        15010/TCP,15012/TCP,443/TCP,15014/TCP                                        18m
jaeger-collector       ClusterIP      10.107.97.241    <none>        14268/TCP,14250/TCP,9411/TCP                                                 2m34s
kiali                  ClusterIP      10.97.181.104    <none>        20001/TCP,9090/TCP                                                           2m28s
prometheus             ClusterIP      10.106.105.122   <none>        9090/TCP                                                                     2m49s
tracing                ClusterIP      10.98.100.68     <none>        80/TCP,16685/TCP                                                             2m34s
zipkin                 ClusterIP      10.103.150.84    <none>        9411/TCP                                                                     2m34s

Jaeger deployment creates 3 services: jaeger-collector, tracing, and zipkin. The tracing service will later provide the Jaeger UI.

» Continue with Exercise 2