Istio operator is a Kubernetes operator to deploy and manage Istio resources for a Kubernetes cluster.
Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices and it is emerging as the standard for building service meshes on Kubernetes.
The goal of the Istio-operator is to enable popular service mesh use cases (multi cluster topologies, multiple gateways support etc) by introducing easy to use higher level abstractions.
Istio operator vs Calisti
Calisti is an enterprise-ready Istio platform for DevOps and SREs that automates lifecycle management and simplifies connectivity, security & observability for microservice-based applications. The Cisco Istio operator is the core part of Calisti's Service Mesh Manager (SMM) component, which helps install, upgrade and manage Istio meshes. Still, SMM also provides many other features to secure, operate and observe Istio conveniently.
The differences are presented in this table:
| Istio operator | Cisco Service Mesh Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Install Istio | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Manage Istio | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Upgrade Istio | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Uninstall Istio | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Multiple gateways support | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Multi cluster support | needs some manual steps | fully automatic |
| Prometheus | ✔️ | |
| Grafana | ✔️ | |
| Jaeger | ✔️ | |
| Cert manager | ✔️ | |
| Dashboard | ✔️ | |
| CLI | ✔️ | |
| OIDC authentication | ✔️ | |
| VM integration | ✔️ | |
| Topology graph | ✔️ | |
| Outlier detection | ✔️ | |
| Service Level Objectives | ✔️ | |
| Live access logs | ✔️ | |
| mTLS management | ✔️ | |
| Gateway management | ✔️ | |
| Istio traffic management | ✔️ | |
| Validations | ✔️ | |
| Support | Community | Enterprise |
For a complete list of SMM features, please check out the SMM docs.
- kubectl installed
- kubernetes cluster (version 1.23+)
- active kubecontext to the kubernetes cluster
Download or check out the latest stable release.
Run make deploy to deploy the operator's controller-manager on your kubernetes cluster.
Check if the controller is running in the istio-system namespace:
$ kubectl get pod -n istio-system
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
istio-operator-controller-manager-6f764787c-rbnht 2/2 Running 0 5m18s
Deploy the Istio control plane sample to the istio-system namespace
$ kubectl -n istio-system apply -f config/samples/servicemesh_v1alpha1_istiocontrolplane.yaml
istiocontrolplane.servicemesh.cisco.com/icp-v117x-sample created
Label the namespace, where you would like to enable sidecar injection for your pods. The label should consist of the name of the deployed IstioControlPlane and the namespace where it is deployed.
$ kubectl label namespace demoapp istio.io/rev=icp-v117x-sample.istio-system
namespace/demoapp labeled
Deploy the Istio ingress gateway sample to your desired namespace
$ kubectl -n demoapp apply -f config/samples/servicemesh_v1alpha1_istiomeshgateway.yaml
istiomeshgateway.servicemesh.cisco.com/imgw-sample created
Deploy your application (or the sample bookinfo app).
$ kubectl -n demoapp apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/master/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml
service/details created
serviceaccount/bookinfo-details created
deployment.apps/details-v1 created
service/ratings created
serviceaccount/bookinfo-ratings created
deployment.apps/ratings-v1 created
service/reviews created
serviceaccount/bookinfo-reviews created
deployment.apps/reviews-v1 created
deployment.apps/reviews-v2 created
deployment.apps/reviews-v3 created
service/productpage created
serviceaccount/bookinfo-productpage created
deployment.apps/productpage-v1 created
Verify that all applications' pods are running and have the sidecar proxy injected. The READY column shows the number of containers for the pod: this should be 1/1 for the gateway, and at least 2/2 for the other pods (the original container of the pods + the sidecar container).
$ kubectl get pod -n demoapp
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
details-v1-79f774bdb9-8xqwj 2/2 Running 0 35s
imgw-sample-66555d5b84-kv62w 1/1 Running 0 7m21s
productpage-v1-6b746f74dc-cx6x6 2/2 Running 0 33s
ratings-v1-b6994bb9-g9vm2 2/2 Running 0 35s
reviews-v1-545db77b95-rdmsp 2/2 Running 0 34s
reviews-v2-7bf8c9648f-rzmvj 2/2 Running 0 34s
reviews-v3-84779c7bbc-t5rfq 2/2 Running 0 33s
Deploy the VirtualService and Gateway needed for your application.
For the demo bookinfo application, you need to modify the Istio Gateway entry! The spec.selector.istio field should be set from ingressgateway to imgw-sample so it will be applied to the sample IstioMeshGateway deployed before. The port needs to be set to the targetPort of the deployed IstioMeshGateway.
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/master/samples/bookinfo/networking/bookinfo-gateway.yaml | sed 's/istio: ingressgateway # use istio default controller/istio: imgw-sample/g;s/number: 80/number: 9080/g' | kubectl apply -f -
$ kubectl -n demoapp apply -f bookinfo-gateway.yaml
gateway.networking.istio.io/bookinfo-gateway created
virtualservice.networking.istio.io/bookinfo created
To access your application, use the public IP address of the imgw-sample LoadBalancer service.
$ IP=$(kubectl -n demoapp get svc imgw-sample -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
$ curl -I $IP/productpage
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
content-length: 4183
server: istio-envoy
date: Mon, 02 May 2022 14:20:49 GMT
x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 739
Please note that the Istio operator is constantly under development, and new releases might introduce breaking changes. We are striving to keep backward compatibility as much as possible while adding new features at a rapid pace. Issues, new features or bugs are tracked on the projects GitHub page - please feel free to add yours!
If you find this project useful, here's how you can help:
- Send a pull request with your new features and bug fixes
- Help new users with issues they may encounter
- Support the development of this project and star this repo!
If you encounter any problems not addressed in our documentation, open an issue or talk to us on the Outshift Slack channel #istio-operator.
We occasionally write blog posts about Istio itself and the Istio operator.
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Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
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