Exercise 1: Setup Istio

Normally in a production size Kubernetes cluster on IBM Cloud we would install Istio as an Add-On. There are 5 Kubernetes add-ons available: Istio, Knative, Kubernetes Terminal, Diagnostic and Debug Tools, and Static Route.

Istio installed via the add-on is a managed service. It creates a production grade Istio instance and it requires a cluster with at least 3 worker nodes with 4 CPUs and 16 GB of memory which our lab Kubernetes cluster doesn't have.

Instead, in this lab we will install the Istio demo profile ourselves using istioctl and the Istio standalone operator. istioctl is available in IBM Cloud Shell, when we wrote these instructions it was at version 1.5.4 which means we will install Istio 1.5.4.

Automated setup

Step 1: Execute following script

  cd $ROOT_FOLDER
  bash $ROOT_FOLDER/IKS/istio-setup.sh

Example output:

...
NAME                                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
grafana-5cc7f86765-bx7cg                1/1     Running   0          7d21h
istio-egressgateway-5c8f9897f7-bgvsb    1/1     Running   0          7d21h
istio-ingressgateway-65dd885d75-mg7dh   1/1     Running   0          7d18h
istio-tracing-8584b4d7f9-jnf2s          1/1     Running   0          7d21h
istiod-7d6dff85dd-nb7v6                 1/1     Running   0          7d21h
kiali-696bb665-wp2kv                    1/1     Running   0          7d21h
prometheus-564768879c-x5q7c             2/2     Running   0          7d21h

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check grafana
Status: Running
2020-08-11 13:44:30 Status: grafana is Ready
------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check istiod
Status: Running
2020-08-11 13:44:31 Status: istiod is Ready
------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check prometheus
Status: Running
2020-08-11 13:44:32 Status: prometheus is Ready
------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check istio-egressgateway
Status: Running
2020-08-11 13:44:32 Status: istio-egressgateway is Ready
------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check istio-ingressgateway
Status: Running
2020-08-11 13:44:33 Status: istio-ingressgateway is Ready
------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check istio-tracing
Status: Running
2020-08-11 13:44:34 Status: istio-tracing is Ready
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Replace telemetry config to expose nodeports
------------------------------------------------------------------------
service "grafana" deleted
service "kiali" deleted
service "prometheus" deleted
service "jaeger-query" deleted
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Label namespace 'default' for auto injection
...

FYI: Manual setup

The following steps show the manual steps of the automated setup. This is just for your information, you don't need to run them!

Step 1: Setup Istio with an operator

The following commands do install the Istio operator, create a namespace for the Istio backplane, and start to installation of the Istio backplane.

• Operator

istioctl operator init

• Namespace

kubectl create ns istio-system

• Istio deployment

kubectl apply -f istio.yaml

• Label default namespace for Istio pod auto-injection

kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled

Step 2: Check the status of Istio deployment

kubectl get pod -n istio-system

When deployment is completed the result should look like this:

NAME                                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
 grafana-5cc7f86765-65fc6                1/1     Running   0          3m28s
 istio-egressgateway-5c8f9897f7-s8tfq    1/1     Running   0          3m32s
 istio-ingressgateway-65dd885d75-vrcg8   1/1     Running   0          3m29s
 istio-tracing-8584b4d7f9-7krd2          1/1     Running   0          3m13s
 istiod-7d6dff85dd-29mjb                 1/1     Running   0          3m29s
 kiali-696bb665-8rrhr                    1/1     Running   0          3m12s
 prometheus-564768879c-2r87j             2/2     Running   0          3m12s